Misc. first impressions

[Eric Stewart]

Hello all,

Just started playing around with Hobix some this weekend and so far I'm 
really impressed.  I have used Movable Type before and currently use 
RuBlog but Hobix has now made quite an impression.  Thanks Why!!!

I wasn't quite sure about the design/usage model at first and had not 
had a chance to play with YAML before either, but after a day or two of 
playing around with it it's getting almost too easy to format and 
customize my weblog.  I may start feeling guilty for not having to work 
at it enough. ;)

I'm a Textile fan and the embedded Textile within YAML still seems a 
little awkward to me.  Maybe I just need to play with it some more. 
Also, the "hobix edit blogName" never seems to work correctly.  I get 
parse errors when saving the hobix.yaml file for the blog even if I 
don't change anything.  Manually editing hobix.yaml works like a charm 
though.

So, here's what a Hobix newbie managed to do in roughly a day's worth of 
playing:

  * Replaced my old crufty homepage with a hobix blog.  Started with the 
default css and hacked a little

  * Borrowed the site.css from William Morgan 
(http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/hobix-is-the-way/2004-September/000056.html) 
and customized it a little.  His was a little closer to what I wanted to 
start out with. Thanks William!

  * Tried to get William's section map working with no success.  I 
always end up running into some kind of injection problem and haven't 
taken the time to try and track it down.

  * Wrote a del.icio.us sidebar plugin. There is simplier code out in 
the world that uses Ruby's networking classes to pull from del.icio.us, 
but I wanted a chance to play with the new Rubilicious library 
(http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/rubilicious/).  I'll post the code soon.

  * Decided that my sidebar was too long with the del.icio.us entries on 
it, so thought I would add another sidebar on the other side.  I was 
really happy with how easy this was.  Basically all I had to do, for 
those interested, was:
    1. Edit my hobix.yaml and customize a few things for the quick 
template.  Notably, I added the following two entries:

       - hobix/out/quick:
         sidebar: |
           <div id="sidebar">
              <+ sidebar_list +>
           </div>
           <div id="sidebarTwo">
              <+ sidebar_two_list +>
           </div>
         sidebar_two_list: |
           <+ sidebar_delicious +>   <<--------- My new plugin

    2) edit site.css and modify a few things.  I had to add a new
       sidebarRight entry that looked pretty much like sidebar except for
       floating to the other side.  Then there were some tweaks to make
       sure the center margins were correct given the presence of the
       other sidebar.

    3) That's just about it.  I'll post a better writeup for someone 
wanting to add another sidebar in Hobix, but this is the basic idea.i


Altogether, a great start.  It still looks like a blocky generic blog at 
the moment, but I'm working on it.  If you care, take a look to see what 
it's shaping up to look like at http://www.eric-stewart.com.

I'll post the del.icio.us plugin code in a bit (or perhaps tomorrow).

-Eric