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Karakuri

Having a closer look at ruby based blogging platforms like serious and toto, I missed some functionality.

This a a collection of tools usable in both platforms. The project was formerly known as blog_helper, but Karakuri is a far more suitable name & will be used from now on.

Features

  • tag your posts
  • use seo friendly page titles
  • use the disqus comment counter
  • a workaround for serious allowing you to use generic yaml fields

Installation

It's a piece of cake: just use the gem tool to get going with the Karakuri: sudo gem install karakuri

If you want to use features that rely on accessing the http requests like the tag feature, you'll need to use the toto_prerelease.

Please follow the instrucions there to do so.

Usage

Piece of cake, again: all you have to do is use <% require 'karakuri'%> in your .rhtml or .erb file and call the corresponding methods.

SEO friendly titles

For example, to use seo friendly titles, your layout.rhtml should be looking like this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
  <head>
    <% require 'karakuri'
       page_title = Karakuri::seo_friendly_title(@path, title, 'yourSitesTitle.com')
    %>
    <title><%=  page_title %></title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<%= page_title %> - feed" href="/index.xml" />
.
.
.

Tags

Adding the tagging feature requires the toto_prerelease as mentioned above, since we need the http request to apply our little hack.

To add a list of tags to your article, just use a custom yaml attribute:

title: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
author: Lyman Frank Baum
date: 1900/05/17
tags: hacks, love, rock 'n' roll

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry,
who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.

Next, you need a place to show the tag links, for example the index.rhtml:

<section id="articles">
  <% require 'karakuri' %>
  <% for article in articles[0...10] %>
    <article class="post">
      <header>
        <h1><a href="<%= article.path %>"><%= article.title %></a></h1>
        <span class="descr"><%= article.date %></span><% 10.times { %>&nbsp;<%}%>
        <span class="tags">
            <%= Karakuri::tag_link_list(article[:tags])  %>
        </span><% 10.times { %>&nbsp;<%}%>
.
.
.

And again: piece of caked ;-). Now all we need to add is a page that displays articles belonging to a ceratin tag:

Create a page called tagged.rhtml in your templates/pages directory that looks like this:

<%
 require 'karakuri'
 desired_tag = Karakuri::desired_tag(env["QUERY_STRING"])
%>
<h1>Posts filed under '<%= desired_tag %>': </h1>
<ul>

<% Karakuri::desired_articles(@articles, desired_tag).each do |article| %>
  <li>
    <span class="descr"><a href="<%= article.path %>" alt="<%= article.title %>"><%= article.title %></a><br/></span>
  </li>
<% end %>
</ul>
<br/>

Now, you did most likely implement a tag listing on your toto blog. Congrats!

short url (via bit.ly)

To use a bit.ly shortened URL, just call the followin function inside a .rhtml file:

<%= Karakuri::short_url_bitly(<url>, <bit.ly login name>, <bit.ly api key>) %>

disqus comment counter

Basically just adds the necessary java script to enable the disqus comment counter. For best performance, place it near the end of the page:

    <%= Karakuri::disqus_comment_count_js(@config[:disqus]) %>
  </body>

</html>

Mind the usage of @config[:disqus], this enables configuration via config.ru.

To access the comment count, use #disqus_thread at the end of the permalink to the post & it will be replaced with the disqus comment count:

<a href="<%= article.path %>#disqus_thread">&nbsp;</a>

Will result in the number of comments of the article the permalink posts to.

serious custom yaml field reader

I hacked serious' custom yaml field access (quite dirty hack) - but please refer to the source & ri for that, I don't use serious anymore.