Remember how I asked for advice on generating local RSS feeds a couple of days ago? My old colleague Brian pointed me to the RubyRSS package, a fairly simple interface to RSS generation. Easy, you think – after all, it’s Ruby, we have gems. Let’s use it.
Since it’s going to be rather technical, the details are hidden behind the cut…
Except this is OSX (Tiger in my case). So there is no Gems. Awesome. Before you head off to install it, be aware that the Darwin Ports version of it seems broken. The best way is going directly for the source.
curl -O http://rubyforge-files.ruby-forum.com/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
sudo /usr/bin/ruby setup.rb
OK, gems is installed. Next stop: simple-rss, a prerequisite for rubyrss. Conveniently enough it’s available as a gem. Except the rdocs are broken and cause gem to spit out a flood of error messages. Seems the developers know about it, too – but why rush a new gem just for a couple of warnings…. Anyways: disabling doc installation does that trick.
sudo gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc simple-rss-1.1.gem
That leaves the main package. And because it’s so much fun, it’s source-only, not packaged as a gem. Installation pains are to be expected, so I created a gem for you (and me) to use: rubyrss-1.1.gem
sudo install rubyrss-1.1.gem
And after all this, I’m finally ready to work on the main task. More on watching directory changes in a later post…
Welcome to open source