Kinetic Energy published 25 Sep 2009 by Nick Quaranto
Welcome to the first edition of The Update! This blog is going to cover the latest features, news, and awesome gems coming out of Gemcutter. Let’s get started.
Announcements
As you can tell, the redesign is live! Thanks to Thoughtbot for donating design time to the project and making sure it looks great.
The next big piece of news is that this site will be moving to http://rubygems.org soon. (The current site will stay live at http://docs.rubygems.org). We’re currently working with the RubyGems team on this, and it will require a little bit of redirecting and rebranding on our part. Stay tuned here for updates!
For those wondering about replacing/redirecting gems.rubyforge.org, there’s a discussion going on at rubygems-developers about this very subject. If you’re a fan of Gemcutter, check out this proposal and lend your support!
We’re also going to use this space to feature gems that are new (and of course, some that are old) that are hosted on the site. This will be a column in the style of GitHub Rebase, so if you’ve got ridiculous Ruby images or great gems, let me know at nick@gemcutter.org.
Features
Much has happened since our launch. (No, that wasn’t planned.) Since then we’ve had a lot of great new features added in:
- Adding/removing owners on a gem
- Subscribe to gems to get a feed of what’s been updated
- Enhanced search with descriptions
- Prerelease gem support
- Better gem documentation
- Faster gem indexing for newly pushed gems
- Improved gem serving thanks to rack-cache and Varnish
- HTTP Proxy support for the gem
And so much more that can’t fit here.
Upcoming
Here’s a sneak peek at some features slated for the future. No guarantees here on what could be finished, but these are some of the ideas in the works. The great part is that you can contribute and make these (or your own) a reality!
- Deleting gems
- Full text search of READMEs from gems
- JRuby support
- Gravatar Integration (everyone loves avatars!)
- Stats page
- Better download tracking for individual gem versions
If you’ve got your own ideas, feel free to submit an issue!
Thanks!
Enough thanks can’t be said for the great start that this project has had so far. This will have to suffice: Thanks to you for using it, our over 15 contributors for their hard work, and Heroku for supporting the project.
If you haven’t yet, gem install gemcutter and gem tumble away! See you next time.
