Last week I posted on the new ICS website I launched at winepos.com which is built using the same little ruby gem as this site, Webby. This week, I'd like to go into a little more detail on some of the things I did in creating their new site. Aside from what little design work I did (admittedly not my strongest ability) I will simply be covering many of the cool things you can do with Webby and a couple of tips and gotchas.

The first step is obviously to create a new project. The webby-gen command should handle things nicely. I used the 'website' template because that was what I was building. From the basic project, I converted and modified all of the files created (layout, templates) to use Haml and to fit with a very basic structure that I was going to use.

After the basic structure was in place, I created files for all of the site pages I was going to need. I also created directories for the feature pages and for the blog posts. At this point, I knew that I was going to be making lots of blog posts and so I created a new template for a blog page. A tip about templates, and pages in general: you can add any variables you would like to the header section of page, and later sort a search on it. Also, you can use Erb in a template and it will be interpreted when generating a new page from the template. For example, in order to get a solid created_at timestamp, I use Time.now.to_y inside an Erb tag.

As I started to develop the site I discovered I was reusing pieces of content more and more frequently. In Rails/Merb it's trivial to create a partial snippet of content, and guess what, it's just as easy using Webby. The only thing to make a note of is that partials are looked for in the same path as a page being rendered. In order to share across different sub- directories you must add a preceding forward slash. For example, this: render :partial => "/newsletter_form" would search for a partial named '_newsletter_form.txt' in the root of the content folder. Also note that a different partial can be rendered by a layout calling partial from the different sub-directories. The default layout could call use partial 'footer' and both the blog and the feature folders could have that footer partial with different structure or content.

The last thing I'll cover is making an atom feed from a set of pages. A similar technique can be used to make an xml sitemap for Google and other search engines. A feed is simply a page that has the extension set to xml and the markup content of which results in valid xml for the required specification. Be sure to set the layout to nil! As for the entries, I like to have all of my posts available in the feed, so I use the symbol :all to return all pages from find. For example: @pages.find(:all, :in_directory => 'blog', :sort_by => 'created_at', :reverse => true) The alternative would be to set a limit of some sort, like this: @pages.find(:limit => 20, :in_directory => 'blog', :sort_by => 'created_at', :reverse => true)

If you're looking to make a website that is going to be just HTML and you don't want to run a webserver aside from Apache or Nginx, Webby is probably the way to go. I certainly love it, and will continue to make static websites using it.