A Ruby project inspired by Thomas Gideon’s python Flashbake project

What is rubyflashbake?

Automatically checks in files from watched directories to git and github with time, location, weather, and recent twitter comments in the commit comments.

“But, why?” you ask

I thought that Flashbake was a very cool project, but since I spend time in the Ruby world – and do more blogging than writing – converting it to Ruby seemed like a fun weekend project. Plus, I wanted to experiment with monitoring directories, building an app that works well with small Ruby plugins, do some web scraping, automate git, and building a gem.
As always, it’s all about writing snippets of fun code. This gave me an excuse to look at

Use

You can find the project on Github. It is also packaged as a Ruby Gem, so you can download and install it by:

sudo gem install cory-rubyflashbake -s http://gems.github.com/

Run rubyflashbake —example in the directory you want to watch to dump the configuration file. Fill in as needed and then launch rubyflashbake and enjoy automatic git and github commits with lots of fun location and web aware commit comments. Bask in joy.

I needed something fun to do as a general learning project while learning the programming language Ruby, behavior driven development, and the testing tools rspec and autotest. I wrote about the early exploration here. I decided to play with converting from Balsamiq Mockups to HTML because Balsamiq is very cool, it provided a relatively complicated text case, and I can imagine some cases where being able to go straight to HTML would make Mockups even more useful. Full description, instructions for use, and code on GitHub. This is unlikely to be worked on again, but was fun to write.

This blog has the text, markup, and css hosted on GitHub, a most excellent service that provides storage of git repositories. Git is normally used for revision control of software code, but it is also possible to use it for storing text or other data. This blog uses GitHub pages to automatically convert the repository into the blog. I am also using the open source project Jekyll and to test changes to style, layout, and to preview new posts.