1.2.3

## Rubinius Has a Blog!

Brian Ford 15 December 2010

Many thought the day would never come, but Rubinius finally has a blog. That’s not all, though: We have integrated the website, blog, and documentation using Jekyll. The source code for it all is in the main Rubinius repository.

People have often requested that we write more about the awesome features in Rubinius. We hear you and we’d love to do this. However, there is always a trade-off between working on those awesome features and writing about them. Until now, it’s been rather painful to write docs or blog posts because we did not have good infrastructure in place. Now, I think we do. I’m sure there are still a lot of improvements we can make, but we have a good place to start. I’d like to give a brief tour of our new system.

The primary goal was to improve collaboration and reduce friction for writing new documentation and blog posts. That’s right, improve collaboration. There are many people who have experience developing Rubinius and running their applications on it. We love how people have collaborated with source code commits. Now anyone has the ability to write a blog post as well. I’ve written a basic How-To - Write a Blog Post document. If you have an idea for a blog post, just let us know. We will exercise a bit of editorial control just to ensure the topics are appropriate for Rubinius, but generally, we are thrilled to have your contributions.

Recently, we added the `rbx docs` command. This will run a web server on your machine and open a browser window to display the Rubinius documentation. Now the documentation will also be available at the rubini.us website. I have added a basic outline and a bunch of files to further simplify the task of writing docs. In many cases, merely open a file and start writing docs in Markdown format.

We have also begun translating our documentation to other languages. I am excited about this, being a huge language geek. I wish that I were proficient in 10 languages so I could polish our documentation for the many people who are not native English speakers. Alas, I only have a fair ability to write in Spanish, so we are again depending on your help. I started the translation effort by passing the existing English docs through Google translate. We have a beginning guide for How-To - Translate Documentation. I’ve been told by kronos_vano in our #rubinius IRC channel that he’s already working on a Russian translation. I personally would love to see Japanese and Chinese translations.

So that’s a brief introduction to our new infrastructure for documenting and explaining Rubinius. It’s been such a joy to see so many people contribute to the Rubinius source code over the years. We hope that the blog, documentation, and translations will further empower people to contribute and benefit from the value that Rubinius has to offer the Ruby community.

¡Adelante!