Blogging and Ruby

So I did a recent post on this topic on my other blog but discovered a few more things in the past couple of days that I thought were good. My blog was about source code formatting when posting blog entries. Every time I want to do a post that contains some source code it always seems like it can be a pain. There’s no way that I’d want to post a lot if it took me fifteen minutes to manually format some source code in html format just to get some nice snippets. So just by chance I tried copying my code snippets from Eclipse (using Aptana) and pasting them into Pages and then exporting what I had to html format. The great thing was was that when I copy from Eclipse and paste into Pages it appears exactly how it does in Eclipse (color, indentations etc). It worked great and I found myself using Pages like this to past html into the post that I was currently working on. Well the only problem with this is that Pages will also add a style-sheet and add classes to divs and what not. So this wasn’t a ‘perfect’ solution. So then I figured since I’m getting back into Ruby I should write a quick little Ruby script that would convert my exported html document into exactly what I wanted for my blog. My last post was using a quick test of what I had in the beginnings of this process. It ended up being a very small script and it does exactly what I want and quickly. So now for all my blogging that I do on my Mac I’ll be using Pages to write my whole blog, Eclipse to copy-and-paste code, and my lil’ script to get it ready for blogger. I can spell-check in Pages, insert links(like above) and now do my source code so it’s almost perfect.

So now I can spend more time blogging and less time doing manual html labor.