Coders tend to like minimalist blogging engines. Give a developer something that processes a directory of markdown and textile files and they’re usually happy.

In the Ruby world, we have LOTS of platforms for doing this:

• Jekyll is a popular platform that’s actually built into Github
• Toto was just announced on RubyInside the other day
• Reprise was announced on RubyInside a few years ago
• Many of the static CMS tools are used for blogs: Webby, StaticMatic, Webgen

Even I’ve written similar platforms. Most recently, I wrote JADOF for the latest version of remi.org (and I’m even using it for my wedding’s website!)

A simple blog is basically the ”Hello World” of web development so I figured it would be fun to test-drive our own hacker blogging engine from scratch!

In this 65 minute screencast, we test-drive:

• creating a simple Post class for accessing our posts (our of a particular directory)
• creating a simple Sinatra application that lists posts
• make sure we can click links to each of the posts to view them
• render the body of our posts as Markdown when we view them

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people enjoy these test-driving style screencasts. Let me know what you think and if you have suggestions for other things I should test-drive!