Use Screwdrivers with Ruhoh

• 
• 

Ruhoh is the static site generator made for publishing content on the Internet. One addicted to jekyll should give a try to ruhoh as well.

Ruhoh utilizes the same philosophy as jekill does. The user creates structured collection of text files, using markdown, textile or another markup processor and the generator produces the static site. Ruhoh supports rsync for deployment, uses mustache for templating and looks like a jekyll 2.0.

Anyway, I integrated rmagick-screwdrivers into ruhoh to make a life easier. The goal I tried to achieve:

• Easily create a post entry with, say, photo-report. Lets imagine you have visited North Pole and made for about 1K of photos. Then you picked up the top-twenty and decided to share them with your friends. My plugins to ruhoh come to rescue.

First of all, we definitely want to use HTML5 figure tags instead of simple img, since we have a couple of words to say about every picture. To do so, create a file plugins/converters/markdown.rb in the root folder of your ruhoh site with the following content:

require "redcarpet"

module Redcarpet
  module RenderHTML5
    # use html5-compliant figures instead of simple images
    # ![Alt text](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")
    class WithFigures < Redcarpet::Render::HTML
      def image(link, title, alt)
        "<figure><img src='#{link}' alt='#{alt}' />
           <figcaption><p>#{title}</p></figcaption>
         </figure>"
      end
    end
  end
end

class Ruhoh
  module Converter
    module Markdown

      def self.extensions
        ['.md', '.markdown']
      end

      def self.convert(content)
        require 'redcarpet'
        markdown = Redcarpet::Markdown.new(
          Redcarpet::RenderHTML5::WithFigures.new(
            :with_toc_data => true, :encoding => 'UTF-8'
          ),
          :autolink => true,
          :fenced_code_blocks => true,
          :encoding => 'UTF-8'
        )
        markdown.render(content)
      end
    end
  end
end

Now all the ![Alt](http://path.to/img.jpg "Figure caption" will be handled by this parser yielding our images as captioned figures.

The other handy improvement is to generate proper scaffold for post entry. To do so we need:

• scale all the images to normal resolution (you know, these 100M cameras produce really huge jpegs.)
• put all the scaled images to the folder known to ruhoh.
• generate a template for out post with all the pictures inserted in.

The full code of respective plugins/client_helpers.rb file may be found at this gist. I would talk about new generator pattern:

Help_Image = [
  {
    "command" => "image <img_file> <title>",
    "desc" => "Create a new post with image."
  }
]

def image
  filename, title = filename_and_title @args[3]
  if File.directory?(@args[2])
    # Update summary when new image is to be added to existing folder
    sum_file = "#{File.basename(@args[2]).gsub(/\W/,'-')}.jpg"
    Magick::Screwdrivers.collage(@args[2]).write \
      File.join(@ruhoh.paths.base, "media", sum_file)
    create_template(filename, title, Dir.entries(@args[2]).map { |d|
      File.join(@args[2], d)
    }, sum_file)
  else
    update_template(filename, title, @args[2])
  end
end

Here we added new default method to bundle exec ruhoh. Now we can execute (for posts collection):

bundle exec ruhoh posts image ~/NorthPole/BestPhotos/ 'North Pole Unleashed'

After a while we yield the new file created in the posts collection and scaled images in media folder. Scaling is customizable within common config.yml file:

images :
  watermark :
    use : true
    date : true
    text : © North Pole Assoc
    min : 200
scales : [400,600]

Since the processing is done, go edit the newly created file. There is an example of result may be found here.