There seems to have been a lot of gem updates and releases recently which is good to see. I’m especially happy with people addressing the problems of BlueCloth with better Markdown processors even though I’m less inclined to use Markdown these days. Anyway, these are all announcements that I think Rails developers should be aware of.

Although this version of rubygems should show up in hardy-backports I’m not sure it will ever be ported to gutsy-backports. So I decided to pull the new version and install it on my Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) systems. I had previously been using 1.0.1 from Debian testing. The steps to install were quite simple. This should work for at least ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 and perhaps other versions as well.

• Started working with Maruku as a replacement for BlueCloth and RubyPants
• Got Rails helper testing setup and started writing tests
• Found a way to switch the linebreaking mode for Maruku and BlueCloth
• Did more work with ICalendar to important and export calendar events
• Started exploring the new Rails 2.0 sanitize helper