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What Is??

A coat arrives at your door. Your mom said she’d drop it off at the door and she did. You inherited the coat from your gramps. Hey, wo! This coat has a skinny pocket, runs vertically over your left breast. (How neat and discreet.) And wonderful knobbly wooden buttons.

Someone left a pair of white gold cufflinks in the lower pocket. White g-g-gold!!!

New Coat for Your Blahhg, Want It??

Hobix is a new coat, but it’s really funky, you gotta be adventurous and intrepid. You have to be able to do a triple front-flip without using your legs at all. If you use Hobix and you can’t do a triple front-flip without using your legs, then you will go to Federal prison. Because you’re almost definitely pullin other heists that are unpaid, comin after ya.

The basic points behind Hobix are:

  • Your blahhg or websyht is made up of some thing.
  • That some thing might be news entries, pix, keynote addresses, spreadsheets.
  • The first page of your blahhg shows the latest some thing.
  • Any some thing can be simplified for the first page.
  • Beyond that, each some thing gets it own page.

Yeah, so?? So what’s adventurous about that?? How is that new and revolutionary and rad and freaky sweet and such?? O-ho. Well, let me tell ya.

Okay, so it’s not. But I really want it to be!!

Ruby is New and Revolutionary and Rad and Freaky Sweet

Hobix is written in Ruby and all the scripting you’ll do will be in Ruby. But, Ruby is pretty simple, so that’s why I said you had to be adventurous but I didn’t say too sly. Ruby’s a pretty language and you’ll go for it.

Basically there are three parts to using Ruby to build a blahhg:

  1. ..in the HTML used to build your blahhg, you’ll use Ruby to get all the dates and titles and stuff for your news entries (some thing).
  2. ..to make your own plugins.
  3. ..to build scripts for doing other fancy stuff with your blahhg. (There’s Ruby hooks for generating the site, adding entries, etc.)

See, watch how you show news entries on the front page for your websyht:

  <h1>news</h1>
  <% entries.each do |e| %>
      <h2><%= e.title %></h2>
      <p><%= e.body.to_html %></p>
  <% end %>

YAML is the New Freaky Rad Sweet

You’ll also be using YAML. If you’ve heard of XML, then let it go. YAML is a simple format that’s getting a leg up on the world (even though it’s still kind of on crutches from having such new legs).

You use YAML in two places:

  1. ..to configure your blahhg. A very simple file.
  2. ..in your some thing: news entries, picture descriptions, whatever.

So, to add new entries, you just create a new YAML file:

  --- !hobix.com,2004/entry
  author: why
  title: Dog on Frazier Buys Oceanfront Property
  content: >

    !http://msn.com/frazier_dog.jpg(Richer than 
    any human named Jack Russell)!

    Today, this dog did this.

Textile Leaps Down And Runs On All Our Heads

Lastly, Textile is used in the entries to keep you from using HTML in your entries. As seen above, exclamations are used to place an image.

Let’s give you a taste of a few other Textile conventions.

features . in textile . in your browser
nice quotes → ==”Yikes,” he said.”== → “Yikes,” he said.”
emphasis → ==I’m so in love!!!== → I’m so in love!!!
strong text → ==Such chunky bacon.== → Such chunky bacon.
mixed → ==30 DAYS NO INTEREST!== → 30 DAYS NO INTEREST!
links → ==Hobix== → Hobix

Yeah, so, Textile makes it a bit easier to read and manage all that writing.

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