A blog by Joe Schmetzer

Renaissance Developer

Atom, Ruby and ERB
Saturday, 19 November 2005

I've just finished overhauling the blog pages on Exubero, to make them more consistent with the other blogs about. The major new feature: there is now an Atom feed for those of you who prefer your readings to via an aggregated feed.

Just to give myself more work, I hand-rolled the entire thing myself without resorting to a blog management tool. I know that there are plenty that would have fit the bill perfectly for me, but this was mainly a learning excercise into the inner workings of feeds, and to keep honing my newfound Ruby skills.

As it turned out, this was a much simpler task than I had feared. I believe this is mainly because the Atom specification was well thought out and simple to implement. Using ERB for templating and Ruby, I was able to quickly split up my existing articles and stitch them back together, both as standard XHTML and as an Atom feed.