Personal Blog Gem

PersonalBlog adds a responsive single-user blog to any Ruby on Rails application. It supports markdown and provides syntax highlighting with a clean, minimalistic design. It is a Ruby on Rails engine that is completely customizable, i.e, you can add CSS and JS to style the blog any way you want. It does not require a user model and is thus, very lightweight. Admin access to create, edit and delete posts is provided through an environment variable to check the password.

To see a live example of this gem being used, you can view my blog.

1. Install this gem,

• Add gem 'personal_blog' to your Gemfile and run bundle.
• You can also do gem install personal_blog.

2. In your config/routes.rb, add mount PersonalBlog::Engine => "/blog" - assuming you'd like it to be available like website.com/blog or localhost:3000/blog in development.
3. Run bin/rake personal_blog:install:migrations. This will copy all the migrations from the engine into your app.
4. Run bin/rake db:migrate.
5. You also need to set an environment variable called 'blog_password'. This is needed for letting only you have admin access to create, edit and delete blog posts.

• For local testing, you can do export blog_password=<your_password> in your ~/.bash_profile for bash and ~/.zshrc for zsh. Don't forget to do source ~/.bash_profile or source ~/.zshrc after this.
• For heroku, you can do heroku config:set blog_password=<your_password>. This guide explains how environment variables work in heroku.
• For nginx, add env blog_password=<your_password>; to your nginx.conf file. This goes outside of the http and server blocks. If you're not sure where your file is, do sudo find / -name "nginx.conf".
• For apache, have a look at the SetEnv directive.

If you're confused about how to use this gem, feel free to send me a tweet!

All the styles and javascripts can be easily overridden by adding files with the same name and at the same location as the engine. For example, if you'd like to override the CSS for posts create a file app/assets/stylesheets/personal_blog/posts.css in your Rails app and add the necessary styles there. Similarly all the styles and javascripts, by overridding the files here.

Have a look at todo.md for a general idea. Improvements on front-end would be great. Also, I'd love it if someone would start writing some tests the application. Contact me at nakulpathak3@hotmail.com if you're confused about how to contribute.

Basic instructions

1. Fork it and then do git clone https://github.com/<your_username>/personal-blog-gem in your terminal to have it locally.
2. Make your changes in the local branch, commit and push to your fork.
3. Go to github.com/your_username/personal-blog-gem and click the Make Pull Request button.
4. Add a helpful description about your changes and you're done. I'll have a look ASAP (ETA: 1 day).