New Weblahh

Your new weblahh is restless. It’s legs are cramping up. Hurry, put on some exercise music.

Saying What Has to Be Said

Two ways of saying what you need to say on your weblahhhag. You can use the commandline:

  hobix post blahhg shortName

This will create a new file named shortName.yaml in your entries directory. Assuming your weblahh is at http://a-dog-a-log-a-bog.com/, this entry will be archived at http://a-dog-a-log-a-bog.com/shortName.html.

You may also organize your entries into category directories. Simply add the category path to the shortName.

  hobix post blahhg news/shortName

The other way of saying what you need to say. You can simply create a new YAML file in the proper directory under entries. Here’s a full YAML entry file:

  --- !hobix.com,2004/entry
  title: Full Title of the Story
  author: author-username-here
  created: 2004-04-01 18:11:39 -05:00

  tagline: A Brief Sentiment To Spark Interest
  summary: >
    Perhaps give a short teaser.  Think hard.
    Have any fisticuffs in your entry?  People
    love to duke it out.

  content: >
    !images/my-face-bruises.jpg!

    Yeah, wo.  Quite a bit of bad, crazy
    fist-fighting.  It's all in a day's
    work.

The created, tagline and summary fields are optional. In fact, Hobix will add the created field for you. The other two are only if you want to be extra professional circa 2050.

Notice the content field above. The !images/my-face-bruises.jpg! line is a Textile command. Textile is a simple replacement for HTML. This command places an image in the content. In Textile, images are embedded by surrounding the image address in exclamation marks.

For more on Textile, see A Textile Reference.

Getting Rid of My Stinky Defaults

So the default websyht is porridge. Absolutely rank.

To edit the look of things, hop into the skel directory. You’ll see a set of files:

  entry.html.quick
  index.atom.atom
  index.html.quick-summary
  index.xml.rss
  index.yaml.okaynews
  monthly.html.quick-archive
  section.html.quick-archive
  sidebar.html.quick
  yearly.html.quick-archive 

Why do these files have more than one extension? Well, the end extension indicates what plugin will process the file. For example, the index.html.erb file will be processed by Hobix’s erb output plugin.

When the file is generated (using the plugin), the ending extension will be removed and the newly created file will be saved in htdocs as index.html. Nothin to it.

However, not every template creates only one new file. The entry.html.erb file is responsible for creating all the archived entries throughout your site. If you have ten entries on your site, entry.html.erb will be the template for all of these ten entries.

Each will have its own name, rather than just entry.html. So, entry is just a prefix, which indicates what the template will be used for.

A Prefix Run Down

Possible file prefixes are:

  index   -> the front page, last 10 entries
             generates htdocs/index.ext

  entry   -> an entry's permanent archive,
             generates htdocs/category/entry-id.ext
             (htdocs/news/shortName.html)

  monthly -> a monthly archive of entries,
             generates htdocs/year/month/index.html
             (htdocs/2004/04/index.html)

  daily   -> like above, but daily
             (htdocs/2004/04/12.html)

So let’s take index.xml.rss as an example. This file will be passed to the rss plugin of Hobix (hobix/out/rss). The plugin will receive the last 10 entries, since the file’s prefix is index. The file will then be save to htdocs/index.xml.

Yeah, so if you want to create rss feeds for every entry in the site, just add a blank file called entry.xml.rss. Then update the latest on the blahhg:

  hobix upgen blahhg

Hackin ERB

ERB is Embedded RuBy. Basically, you can place Ruby code between < and > tags. The code will be executed as the file is read. You can print a variable to the page with:

  <%= var %>

Every ERB template is given three variables which you can use in Ruby:

weblog

The weblog variable is a Hobix::Weblog object. This object contains all the information from your hobix.yaml file. You can also search for entries and edit them through this object.

Generally, you’ll use it to display information about the weblahhg.

  <title><%= weblog.title %> (<%= weblog.tagline %>)</title>

You could use the above in your index.html.erb to see to it that your front page has the title and tagline of the weblahhg in the browser’s title bar.

page

The page variable contains a Hobix::Page object, information about the current page. The latest update to any entry on the page is in the updated property.

  This page last updated on <%= page.updated %>

The page variable also has links to the current page, as well as the previous page and next page. This way you can set up arrows to link to the previous month’s or next month’s page in monthly.html.erb.

The last and next links in this tutorial are generated like this:

  <% if page.prev %>
    &lt; <a href="<%= page.prev %>">last</a>
  <% end %>
  <% if page.prev and page.next %>|<% end %>
  <% if page.next %>
    <a href="<%= page.next %>">next</a> &gt;
  <% end %>

entries (or entry)

The entries (or entry) variable contains one or more Hobix::Entry objects which have been loaded for the page. In the case of a template with an entry prefix, only one entry is passed into the template at a time. This entry is placed in the entry variable.

All other pages use the entries variable, which contains an Array of Hobix::Entry objects.

The Hobix::Entry object has all the same properties as the YAML file we discussed in the last section. It also has an id property (the entry’s shortName) and a link property (a URL to where the entry is permanently saved.)

On your index.html.erb, you might display the last 10 entries by iterating through the entries list.

  <% entries.each do |e| %>
    <div class="titleBar">
    <div class="entryTitle"><%= e.title %></div>
    <div class="entryDate">
      <%= e.created.strftime( "%m %d %Y @ %I:%M %p" ) %></div>
    </div>
    <div class="entryBody">
      <%= e.content.to_html %>
    </div>
  <% end %>

Skel is Bare Bones

Keep skel uncluttered. Templates only. I admit. I like to use Apache server-side includes. I keep them in skel. Anything in skel which isn’t recognized as a plugin is simply coped over to htdocs when you regenerate.

Still, keep skel limited to the very bones of your websyht. Store your images and other downloads in htdocs.