At last, after months of procrastination, I decided to re-write my blog.

This post contains a list of software that made this blog happen. –

My blog is full of bombs and or “keys”:errorwear.com.

It has been a very entertaining and busy two weeks. In screencasts “DHH”:Ruby on Rails — A web-app framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. shows us how easy it is to create a web log using the rails framework. In fact, it only takes 15 minutes.

If only.

Building my blog took a little bit longer than 15 minutes. Of course my needs are hard to fill and I knew very little about rails before I started. I wanted a lot: Security, Textile, Tags, Spam protection and a clean migration from my “previous blog engine”:http://www.subtextproject.com/.

Migrating a win2k machine to Linux is an interesting and challenging experience. As of now, I have no access to my server cause I firewalled myself off the box using Shorewall.

I guess I should come clean and give some shout-outs to all the software that made this blog happen. (Excluding the obvious Ruby and Rails)

h3. Development tools

• “Aptana”:http://www.aptana.com/ : I used Aptana to write this site, it is a very nice IDE based of eclipse with excellent ruby and rails support.

• “Firefox web developer tool bar”:Web Developer – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) : Turns a one hour session debugging an odd CSS bug into a 10 second exercise.

• “Firebug”:http://www.getfirebug.com/ : If you do any web development, stop reading this and go download it now.

h3. Ruby Gems

• “Coderay”:http://coderay.rubychan.de/ : The best library I could find for syntax highlighting in Ruby.

• “Redcloth”:http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/ : The default library for textile support. Somehow most of my previous posts ended up having very complicated html. I am determined not to have this happen again. In fact - my source of truth for all my posts is in textile.

• “HTML5”:HTML5 Sanitizer : I use this to protect my site from evil cross site scripting.

h3. Rails plug-ins

• “Textile Editor Helper”:http://slateinfo.blogs.wvu.edu/plugins/textile_editor_helper : The nice toolbar you see on top of the comments

• “ror-akismet”:http://rubyforge.org/projects/ror-akismet/ : This plug-in needed a bit of TLC to get it working. It gives me a spam protection courtesy of Akismet:“http://akismet.com/”.

h3. Reference source code

• “Typo”:http://typosphere.org/ : The current default rails blogging engine, it does it all. And more.

• “Mephisto”:http://mephistoblog.com/ : A nice tight blogging engine.