When my Blog Poster script isn't posting a "social" entry, it drops the files in the "now" directory/category. I figured that "now" was a good a way as any to describe these quick posts that aren't meant as direct social media posts. They go to Twitter as a "normal" blog post, with title and link (instead of post body with no title or link).

Why does Ruby's system call to vim allow me to write a file sometimes but not other? I can write all files in Windows with Notepad, and all files with vim in Linux.

Update: Now I seem to be having no problem using Vim for read/write. Maybe my last change (removing routine that read from a text file) fixed this bug, too.

I'm not sure if this is a Windows-specific problem (I am currently developing on Windows 10), but part of the Ruby script in my Blog Poster app allows the user to "archive" all of the text files created as blog/social posts by moving them from the main program directory to an archives directory. I could opt not to create files at all, or have the script continue to overwrite the same one for each post.

But for now I'm keeping all of the text files (which the script creates and names based on the <title> tag of URLs that are part of the post, and I have an option to move those text files to the archive directory:

Dir.glob("*.txt") {|f| FileUtils.move File.expand_path(f), "archive" }

This part of the Ruby script worked fine when I started it and was doing nothing else, but if I used it to create one or more files, invoking the "archive" feature would error out and kill the script, saying that there was a permission issue.

Laziness. I looked in Stack Overflow and found the solution, which consisted of adding :force => true to the expression:

Dir.glob("*.txt") {|f| FileUtils.move File.expand_path(f), "archive", :force => true }

Now I can create posts (and their matching .txt files, which my blog uses) and then archive them at any point without the permission error killing the script. Thanks, Stack Overflow user mudasobwa.

Update: This modification allowed the script to keep running, but any files created during the current session are NOT moved to the archive directory.

The reason the files created during the session were not deletable is due to the script reading them out in the console. I will figure out a way to provide this output without rendering the files "undeletable" via Ruby.

Here are the lines I am removing for now:

puts "This is your file:\n\n"
File.open( @yourFileName ).each do |line|
   puts line
end

When Dan Benjamin mentioned that his Unwound watch podcast co-host Seth Roberts' website for his Hub City Vintage business is now running on Squarespace, a bell went off for me.

Not that there's anything wrong with Shopify, but it's nice to know that there's an alternative for the small (or maybe not-so-small) business to both have a website and offer fully integrated e-commerce for a reasonable monthly fee and without a lot of development cost and hassles.

Many say Shopify is a better choice, but if you want to keep it simple, Squarespace is a viable option.

The top 8 Van Halen songs:

1. (tie) Runnin' With the Devil
2. (tie) Jump
3. You Really Got Me
4. Ain't Talking 'Bout Love
5. Panama
6. Dance the Night Away
7. Hot for Teacher
8. Beautiful Girls

This is not part of the /updates directory, and IFTTT should send it to Twitter.

The last piece missing from the Blog Poster app is the ability to post directly to Twitter and eliminate the dependency on third-party services like dlvr.it and IFTTT. Shouldn't be too hard.

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.