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Here's what I wanted to do: just concentrate on the daily writing of my weblog, and have all the archiving and posting to the website taken care of. There are several packages you can buy that will do this and more, but they all require a webserver install.

I was looking for a very low threshold of "install fever". Plus I reasoned that by creating my own automatic weblog manager, I'd come to understand the issues involved in syndicated web publishing.

Furthermore, I wouldn't have to get used to any design shortcomings or usability problems in other software. This is more in the spirit of www.thedailychannel.com anyway; I read the books, write the reviews, take the photos, and create the graphics. So why not automate the weblogs myself too?

With that in mind, I dusted off my Camp David notepad, sharpened up the old yellow golf pencil, and set to work. expires=never stories=10 days=8 pools=XML, Blog, Ruby

After I stumbled across Rael Dornfest's Blosxom weblog manager and installed it, I couldn't get it to work. I decided I might as well implement the same functionality with the Ruby programming language, which ships installed on every new Apple Macintosh computer. This is the account of exactly how to do what I did, and why.

Actually, Ruby is just part of the story. This adventure promises to take us far and wide, into XML, XSLT transform processing, the virtues of static webserving, and online publishing for syndication. Welcome to OrangeButton, where I tell you how to create your own weblog, and give you the tools to do it, free.

What a great promise. Now all I have to do is figure out what to name this source file, and where to save it. I'm calling it "ob1.dat", and saving it in the "blogs" folder of my offline copy of www.thedailychannel.com. I'm going to put all the story files in there, and process them (and parts of them) out into .xml and .html files. Like a lot of programmer types I'm using BBEdit on the mac, but you could use pine or emacs, or whatever.

I save the file in unix format, because I've discovered in the past that Ruby likes that format best when it's processing.

After I write some ruby scripts to process this file (and some others), I'll be back to explain the overall architecture of what I'm calling "RubyJournal", a new open-source free weblog manager. Welcome aboard the orangebutton. expires=never stories=10 days=8 pools=XML, Blog, Ruby