Scratch User Manual

Prerequisites

If you're installing from the gem, it will get everything for you except for sqlite, which you'll need to install first.

Installation

You should use Ruby Gems to get started with Scratch. Once you install Ruby and Ruby Gems, a simple command will bring you online with Scratch:

% gem install Scratch

NB You MUST have the Rails gem installed. There is currently a bug in ActionPack that prevents me from making the Scratch gem properly depend on Rails. Once this bug is fixed, the gem dependencies will be as they should.

This will install the Scratch gem and its requirements on your computer. The requirements are merely Ruby on Rails and RedCloth. Nothing heavy, stuff you should already have.

Starting Scratch

The Scratch gem comes with a start up program called scratch. When run for the first time this program will create your database and prompt you for a username and password. Passing the parameter --help to scratch will show you a list of configurable options.

Posting to Scratch

To post to Scratch, you'll need some software that can handle the meta-weblog API. MarsEdit and ecto seem decent. Drop me a line if you have success with anything else.

Reading Scratch

To read your posts, you and your friends will need to use a feed aggregator. NewsFire and NetNewsWire 2 are pretty decent. There are tons of other readers out there. Anything that handles Atom or RSS should work. Use whatever scratches your itch.