cnsuhao / markdownjournal

Plain text journaling with Markdown and Dropbox on the Sinatra platform.

Markdown Journal

An online journal which saves short, tweet like entries into Markdown documents inside of your Dropbox. You can see it in action at markdownjournal.com.

Requirements

System Requirements

• Ruby
• Ruby Gems
• Bundler

Runtime Gem Dependencies

Gem dependencies are now managed by Bundler. To download and install all the required gems automatically run the following in the project folder:

bundle install

In case you are interested, here is the list of gems that are being installed:

• Sinatra Gem
• Active Support Gem
• Dropbox API Gem
• TZInfo Library

Development Time Requirements

These are optional, but make your life easier. I have not included the Twitter Boostrap or jQuery files with this project. Instead the public directory contains a component.json file with list of dependencies. This file is used by bower to fetch the required files. To use it you will need:

• Node.js
• Bower

User Requirements

• Dropbox account to store the journal

Config

You will need a Dropbox API key. You can register one here. Once you have App key and App secret values you will need to create a configuration file for your application.

Create a file config.yml in the root directory of the project. Inside you should have:

key: your-dropbox-app-key-string
secret: your-dropbox-app-secret-string
url: http://localhost:4567/write

Go to the public directory and run:

bower install

This will fetch Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery into the public/components directory. Now you should be all set.

Make sure you have sinatra, dropbox_api and other gems installed:

gem install bundler
bundle install

You can run the application locally like this:

ruby app.rb

On older versions of ruby you may need to use:

ruby -rubygems app.rb

This will run a server at http://localhost:4567.

Known Issues

If you run into parsing errors when reading user YAML files, uncomment the following line in the code:

YAML::ENGINE.yamler= 'syck'

In the newer versions of Ruby the default YAML parser sometimes throws a fit when reading files that have weird line endings or other artifacts. The Syck parser seems to work fine most of the time.

Licensing

Markdown Journal is licensed under GPLv3.