Creating a Ruby Static Blog

Background - I served this website, rickpeyton.com, as a Wordpress blog since it’s inception back in 2011. In February of 2014 I decided that I wanted to finally learn an object-oriented programming language and, after much back and forth in my head, landed on Ruby.

As of May 27, 2014 I have worked through Chris Pine’s “Learn to Program” Ruby, second edition. I have also attempted a couple of coding challenges on reddit, picked up “Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0” aka The PickAxe (thanks to a recommendation from Justin Weiss) and written a couple of simple scripts.

One script is used to join audio book files together on the command line using ffmpeg and another for calculating my monthly budget categories for my fluctuating Amazon Subscribe and Save items and the future renewal fees for my domains with Godaddy. Side note, if you aren’t using YNAB, you should just stop reading this and go download it.

I have several professional goals that I want to accomplish via my personal mastering ruby challenge, but I think those are still a little too complex for my current skills.

I don’t know about you, but I definitely learn best by doing and so I selected creating a Ruby static blog from scratch as my next task.

Two weekends and 360 some lines of code later here is a look at my generating file pastebin (I'll add to GitHub soon) and a link to the REDACTED of this post. Feedback welcome! I haven’t been able to wrap my head around Classes yet, but based on my limited understanding I think I’m repeating entirely too much code. My next couple of projects are going to involve refactoring with the inclusion of classes and then refactoring this code some more.