New Blog Tooling 05 Apr 2009

To help out with the new blogging system I had fun hacking up some support scripts. I tried a new style this time, one base script and a bunch of plugins, so I do things now, as

$ blog create new_blog_tooling
$ blog edit new_blog_tooling

Which is kind of shiny. I did it in ruby as I wanted to just get it done, but as I futzedI realized I really wanted a module system more like Lua or Erlang’s - I didn’t want to know the module name, but wanted to access stuff on it.

The closest I got was a pretty gross eval hack, which looks like

def load_command command
  it = File.open(File.join(CommandDir, "#{command}.rb")) do |f|
    f.readlines.join("")
  end
  ms =<<-EOM
    Class.new do
      #{it}
    end
  EOM
  eval(ms).new
end

Which creates an instance of an anonymous class and lets me call methods on it, the “plugins” then are just bare method definitions, like

def execute
  draft_dir = File.join(BaseDir, "_drafts")
  name = ARGV[1]
  exec "#{ENV['EDITOR']} #{File.join(draft_dir, "#{name}.textile") }"
end

def usage
  "<name>"
end

def help
  "open <name> in $EDITOR"
end

Which are usd to generate help and execute the actual commands,

$ blog -h
Usage: blog command [additional]

  blog create <name>
    creates a new draft with name <name>

  blog drafts 
    list all drafts

  blog edit <name>
    open <name> in $EDITOR

  blog kill <name>
    destroy the draft <name>

$

Annoyed at having to use an eval hack, but hey, it works.