I'm teaching a Ruby on Rails class this term at the Art Institute of Portland. I wanted to create a place to make my class notes available. Also, I wanted to be able to edit them at any time and to be able to edit them in an easy, simple markup language. My solution was this, create a simple Rails web application that serves up a list of documents which are merely files stored in folder that are written in Markdown syntax. Markdown is nice, because it looks pretty decent as plain text, and converts into decent, simple HTML with bold headings, italicized or bold text or preformatted code blocks as necessary. So, I did it, I put together a simple Rails 3.0 app that accomplishes that exact purpose. It only took about an hour (not counting the time actually spent writing the content.) The code is released under a BSD license and the content will be available under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. The page is available right now, here: rails.deliciousrobots.com.

I got the Markdown plugins for Vim, which are fantastic and make it downright enjoyable to edit this text. I added Google's prettify to syntax-highlight the code blocks for me. It's the same JavaScript library I use on this blog. Instead of keeping the content in a volatile database, it is tracked through the Git repository. I also made the source available on github. Even if all you want to do is add to or update my content, or fix a bug in the code or add a feature to the web application, you can fork my git repository here : github.com/deliciousrobots/md_docs. Just send me a pull request and I can update my content or code with your changes. Neat, huh?