I’ve been using my everything concept for a while now. I enjoy the structure it gives me for my writing collection. To help me do things with the writings, I’ve written various pieces of software. Quickly enough, I had similar code duplicated across multiple projects, with little differences here and there.

Rewriting that code every time or even copying and pasting it into each new project isn’t an extensible way to build a suite of tools. Instead, I want a single piece of code I can include in multiple projects and just use. I also wanted to explore creating gems for Ruby. The goal is to keep the core software pretty small, and then extend it using other, small gems.

To that end, I’ve been working on everything-core. It provides the basic functionality needed to work with a piece in everything.

I haven’t used it much on my own yet, but that’s because only tonight did I finally get enough functionality in there to make that feasible. Now, you’re able to get a piece’s markdown content as well as its metadata. I’ve also tested the code in the gem, to make things a little more robust. I’d appreciate if you report any issues you run across.

I’m writing this post, in part, to check whether I can rework my Wordpress publishing script to use the gem. If this post makes it live at all, it will be proof of success!

I’m happy to share a small milestone in my project. I look forward to expanding on this core going forward.