I just coded a small feature for the Blog Poster app (a Ruby script) that allows the user to choose between two different directories when posting a "raw" update that isn't meant for the /updates/ directory that IFTTT taps for explicit social posts (using the body text instead of the title for the post). When making a "raw" post, the user can now choose the /now directory for timely posts that would be better with the traditional title-and-link style social posting that "normal" blog entries usually get when fed to social media accounts.

I'm not quite sure how I stumbled upon the Ruby Terminal Apps Toolkit, but the gems included can definitely speed your development of interactive Ruby apps on the command line.

I just coded a menu for my app, and these gems by Piotr Murach offer a lot of ways to do this easily and to solicit and process user input.

The next thing I'm looking at doing in my app is allowing users to open lines for editing in their text editor of choice, and these TTY gems definitely do that. I wasn't thinking that shelling out to an editor would be so hard (meaning that was something that Ruby can do with no gems), but maybe this is a better (or easier) way.

The "hard" part in allowing user editing in my app is that I am assembling files to upload from a series of variables, and I think I'll have to create temporary files for editing that only include the component being modified (i.e. title, text, link, filename) because my app knows how to turn variables into a file but not a file into a series of variables, though that is something I could code into it. (But I may not do this because I am thinking of going in another direction and not creating actual files on the system at all and using Ruby to stream the data via FTP.)

That's more detail without context about the app I'm working on than you need.

tl;dr: The Ruby Terminal Apps Toolkit can speed up development of command-line based apps. You can use single gems or the whole thing. It's up to you.

Since I installed the JDK instead of the JRE, I didn't know if automatic Java updates would come at all and would cover the development portion of the tools.

I got the update today, and as you can see from the image above of my Windows command line, all is updated.

I'm actually doing it. I'm writing a blog-posting program that will take an http link, extract the remote page's title and create a social-media-style blog post (title, body text and link) that can be easily uploaded to my flat-file blogging system's server.

The idea is to make it as easy to post a "social"-style update to my own blog as it is to post to Twitter (or Facebook or Google+).

(I use IFTTT -- and formerly dlvr.it -- to post these social entries on Twitter, but I could see this program taking over that task as well.)

Back to my application. I could have gone several different ways from a conceptual standpoint.

• I could have done this idea as a web app, but in order to get the files to upload to the blog, I'd either have to write a server component on that side, or create a backend service -- with some measure of security -- to handle the upload (I'm using FTP, but it doesn't have to be that).

• I thought about a desktop GUI. I want this to be a true cross-platform app. I seriously considered using the now-ancient Tk framework with Ruby. I less-seriously considered Java FX, though I did successfully hack together code to upload via FTP using Java. (At least it was a worthwhile programming exercise.) I could have gone with QT. Maybe I could have done the whole thing with QML.

I'm not ruling out any of these GUI solutions, but I needed to start coding, and the easiest, quickest thing for me to do (or so I thought) is a menu-driven console app. I could have gone with Java, JavaScript, Ruby, even Perl. I did tests of various components in three of those languages.

I'm writing the app for the console with an eye toward re-using the code in a future GUI app, and for that reason maybe I should have used JavaScript.

But I really wanted to use Ruby. I'm trying to grasp object-orientated programming, and there is a whole lot of web-based help for Ruby programmers that often acknowledges that there are beginners out there who need a helping hand.

And I really would love to eventually port this code to Tk, or even as a Sinatra or Rails app. I should want to do it in JavaScript. But Ruby is so friendly, and it's made for use in the console.

So I'm writing it in Ruby. And I have some 190 lines of code that do the following:

• Display a menu of tasks and wait for input
• When a URL is entered, grab the HTML title
• Create a simple document with a title and text derived from the remote HTML title
• Add a Markdown-formatted link back to the original HTML page
• Save all as a text file with an auto-generated file name incorporating the current date and text derived from the title
• Allow user to enter different text for the title or body
• Let user choose not to include the source site's URL
• Save all to a text file
• Upload to website via FTP and "tell" blog to index the new entry

I have all of these features working, and while the app is very far from perfect, it is functional. The code isn't ready for public consumption -- it needs lots of cleanup before I publish it, and it's really meant more for Ode users and blogs that work in a similar way (files are uploaded to a server, from which the blog software renders them for the reader) than it is for flat-file systems such as Hugo, where a dedicated program builds the blog locally and sends files on their way, but the concepts and code used in this app can certainly be modified for that workflow -- and I'm not at all above doing that in the future.

Aside from adding more features, primarily the ability to edit elements instead of re-typing them (maybe by invoking the vi editor), I want to make the code more modular. Right how it's a huge procedural hack, and modularity (and object orientation) will make it cleaner and more flexible. That's the idea anyway.

Before that I need to clean up the configuration, which is all over the place.

Still, I wanted to make an app, I used the skills I had (and Googled and read plenty), and now I have something that works, however ugly it may look on the back end.