Let’s face it, BlueCloth has been around a long time. And as it is flawed it is also dead slow. I need a solid Markdown replacement: enter RDiscount.

Implementing this in your Rails project is easy peasy:

[sudo] gem install rdiscount

Also add the following requirement in the …/config/requirement.rb

config.gem "rdiscount"

And make your life a lot simpler by using an extension for the String class by creating a …/config/initializers/string_extension.rb

String.class_eval do
  def markdown
    RDiscount.new(self).to_html
  end
end

So now you can issue bold statements like

"Hello _Crazy_ World!".markdown

I’m doing the same tasks everytime whilst importing a new Rails project in the Subversion repository. Just stole and altered a rake task to make life somewhat simpeler

create svn.rake in …/lib/tasks

namespace :svn do
  desc "Configure Subversion for Rails"
  task :configure_for do
    system "svn remove log/*"
    system "svn commit -m 'removing all log files from subversion'"
    system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/'
    system "svn update log/"
    system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /log/ ending in .log'"
    system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.db" db/'
    system "svn update db/"
    system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /db/ ending in .db'"
    system "svn move config/database.yml config/database.sample.yml"
    system "svn commit -m 'Moving database.yml to database.example to provide a template for anyone who checks out the code'"
    system 'svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config/'
    system "svn update config/"
    system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring database.yml'"
    system "svn remove tmp/*"
    system "svn commit -m 'Removing /tmp/ folder'"
    system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/'
  end
  desc "Add new files to subversion"
  task :add do
    system "svn status | grep '^\?' | sed -e 's/? *//' | sed -e 's/ /\ /g' | xargs svn add"
  end
end