Who is interested to work on http://ruby.begin-site.org/ (The Ruby Beginners' Site)?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

I have set up a central site for all quality sites I readily recall for
beginners in certain computer (and in the future also non-computer) technologies
here - http://www.begin-site.org/ . Now, some people I talked with on IRC,
urged me to create such a web site for Ruby beginners similar to
http://perl-begin.org/ or http://vim.begin-site.org/ (which is still work in
progress) , because while there are many resources online for Ruby, it's hard
to separate the grain from the chaff.

So any takers? If you want you can just start a repository of your own for the
source code (CC-by is the preferable licence, but CC-by-sa is also acceptable),
and set up a site somewhere (GitHub and SourceForge.net offers hosting for
static sites, with domain mapping) and I'll point or redirect
ruby.begin-site.org to it and add a link to www.begin-site.org .

I would have started doing it myself, but I already have enough projects on my
plate (and recently started subcontracting for a small consulting company which
reduced the amount of free time I have even further), and I'm also not a big
Ruby expert. But the need is genuine.

(And naturally if anyone wishes to take on themselves to
maintain a knitting.begin-site.org (or whatever - ;-)), this will be welcome.)

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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[ASAF HALILI]

I will be happy to help during my free time. 

Asaf. 

בתאריך יום רביעי, 23 בינואר 2013, Shlomi Fish כתב:

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[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Asaf,

On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:03:32 +0200
ASAF HALILI <asaf....@gmail.com> wrote:

> I will be happy to help during my free time.
> Asaf.

Sounds good. Do you have a preference for a VCS (Git/Hg/bzr/svn/etc.), code
hosting provider (GitHub/Bitbucket/SourceForge/Google Code/etc.), and content
management system (see
http://iwantmyname.com/blog/2011/02/list-static-website-generators.html or
naturally something like a Wiki is also acceptable, especially
http://ikiwiki.info/ ).

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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[ASAF HALILI]

Git is my automatic preference and with it GitHub.

About the CMS, I usually don't use static pages based cms. Do you have any recommendations? based on your experience..

Thanks, Asaf. 

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[Avi Tzurel]

You guys should try Jekyll, it's great, my blog (http://avi.io) is build with Octopress, using Jekyll as the engine

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Asaf,

On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:30:04 +0200
ASAF HALILI <asaf....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Git is my automatic preference and with it GitHub.
>

Sounds good, no problems here.

> About the CMS, I usually don't use static pages based cms. Do you have any
> recommendations? based on your experience..

OK, here is a round up of what I used so far.

1. Website Meta Language
( http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/website-meta-language/ ) is an
early attempt at an HTML preprocessor, and is powerful, but takes some time to
learn. I'm maintaining it now (after Ralf S. Engelschall and Denis Barbier) and
I've used it for several sites. I ended up finding that I use similar logic in
several cases which made me extract Latemp (
http://web-cpan.shlomifish.org/latemp/ ), which is a static site generator /
offline CMS, that abstract away some of the WML glue for stuff.

Both WML and Latemp have a steep learning curve, and require some time of
getting used to, and learning, but I found them useful for my sites. More over,
their syntax is irregular, somewhat quirky and rich, which makes it hard to
read for a human at first.

2. Ikiwiki ( http://ikiwiki.info/ ) is a wiki compiler that stores the wiki
pages inside a version control repository such as Git or Subversion. Setting up
an instance was somewhat time consuming, and I didn't document the exact
procedure, but can reproduce it if I need to. It can export to a static site,
but also gives you a web interface for editing. Here is an example of it:
http://perl-tutorial.org/ .

3. Jekyll ( http://jekyllrb.com/ ) appears to be the new poster child of static
site generators and is quite overhyped. I started using it for
http://vim.begin-site.org/ , but found out that while the trivial tasks were
easy there, hard tasks were still quite hard, and often required writing custom
plugins, for which I lacked the skills for writing. When someone proposed to
prepare a translation of Vim-Begin, the only plugin I could find was
https://github.com/blackwinter/jekyll-localization which had an iffy licence
(AGPLv3) and heavily lucking documentation, and this bug I reported for it was
closed https://github.com/blackwinter/jekyll-localization/issues/3 (although
admittedly, the tone in the original message was bad).

There's also this IRC conversation on #jekyll:

<<<<<
[QUOTE]
<rindolf> Hi all.
<rindolf> I'd like to share some frustration I have with using Jekyll. I
previously used http://web-cpan.shlomifish.org/latemp/ , which is my own
creation based on Website Meta Language and other technologies, and I found
some things absent in Jekyll like a navigation menu or a breadcrumbs trail
using it. Now, when googling for doing that in Jekyll, I usually ran into blogs
posts or Stackoverflow threads and not actual plugins.
<rindolf> And Jekyll seems kinda opaque to me (though admittedly I didn't try
to read its code).
<rindolf> Does anyone feel the same way too?
<lietu> well, having only used jekyll for a while, certain aspects are a bit
unclear and I feel there is a bit too much marketing hype around it, but it
works fine, and the information is eventually easy enough to find
<lietu> for example I assumed from the information I found about Jekyll before
starting on it, that it would by default support LESS compiling, JS, CSS and
HTML minifying, etc. .. ended up having to set up plugins and code a bit myself
to get all that working .. having never coded a single line of ruby before, it
was a bit painful
<lietu> but if they end up actually putting more of that kind
of stuff in the core, or make proper plugins for all that and link to them
easily, it will be a lot better
<rindolf> lietu: I see.
<lietu> .. oh, and the list of dependencies for my whole package is now
ridiculously large, to build my website with jekyll, using google closure
compiler, jekyll-asset-pipeline, lessc from node (the easiest dependency
really), jekyll-press nad jekyll-minimagic requires me to install half of the
packages available in the repositories to get it running
<rindolf> lietu: I see.
[/QUOTE]

4. A custom static site generator (based on Template Toolkit/etc.) - that's
what I opted to use for http://mikmod.shlomifish.org/ and later on adapted for
http://www.begin-site.org/ and for
http://www.shlomifish.org/temp-www.linux.org.il-new-site/ . Writing your own
static site generator based on a build system and a good preprocessor or
template system is not hard, and seems like every self-respecting programmer
has done it at least once:

* http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Programs-Every-Programmer-has-Written/

Anyway, you can expect this generator to become more complex and feature rich,
as time goes by, but this is expected with most software (see
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=stroustrup-about-java ),
and reinventing the wheel may be justified here.

-------------------------

And like I said there are more mentioned here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=stroustrup-about-java

And there are also:

* http://webmake.taint.org/

* https://metacpan.org/module/HiD (Perl / CPAN / Moose Jekyll clone - not sure
it's any better than Jekyll).

* http://ninuzzo.github.com/hyde/advantages.html

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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[asaf halili]

Thank you for the details.

After reviewing most of the suggested content management systems,
I think I'll begin to work with ikiwiki and with the growth of the site I'll consider moving to home-made solution.

Sounds Good?

Thanks, Asaf.
‏בתאריך ה-24 בינו 2013, בשעה 12:14, Shlomi Fish כתב/ה:

[Shlomi Fish]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:45:31 +0200
asaf halili <asaf....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for the details.
>
> After reviewing most of the suggested content management systems,
> I think I'll begin to work with ikiwiki and with the growth of the site I'll
> consider moving to home-made solution.
>
> Sounds Good?

Sure! I'd rather not get too much into a colour of the bike shed discussion
here - http://bikeshed.com/ ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality - because these
tend to stiffle actual productive activity. So I suggest you go for it, set up
and create a starting site, put the sources on GitHub, and put it online
(possibly on the GitHub pages-service to which one can also map something like
ruby.begin-site.org ). If you are unhappy with Ikiwiki later on, you can always
import the content of the pages into a different system (which is likely what I
am going to do with vim.begin-site.org because I'm unhappy with Jekyll and
find it hard to figure it out).

Regards,

Shlomi Fish

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