Archive for February 2012

Rambling Trie 0.3.3 has been released!

February 13, 2012

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on February 13, 2012.

The new version of the rambling-trie gem is out! As I said on my previous post, the rambling-trie is an implementation of the Trie data structure in Ruby.

Version 0.3.3 has several performance improvements, and I also added the code’s documentation via Yard. Also, since the previous version (0.3.2), the methods has_branch_for? and is_word? have been fixed for the compressed trie.

For the uncompressed trie, the has_branch_for? and is_word? methods work very fast. The compressed trie’s is_word? method is as fast as it’s uncompressed counterpart, but the has_branch_for? is a bit slower.

I’ve also added some benchmarking reports for each version of the rambling…
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Rambling Trie: A custom Trie data structure implementation in Ruby

February 10, 2012

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on February 10, 2012.

We’re proud to announce that our first gem is here!

It’s called rambling-trie, and it’s an implementation of the Trie data structure. A Trie is an ordered tree data structure, and it is great for managing dictionaries and for word searching and matching.

Now, to install the rambling-trie, you can either install it manually by running:
```
gem install rambling-trie
```
Or, you can add this line to the Gemfile of your application:
```
gem 'rambling-trie'
```
To create a new Trie you can do this:
```
require 'rambling-trie'

trie = Rambling::Trie.new
```
And to add a new word to the Trie, you can call this:
```
trie.add_branch_from 'word'
```
Or to automatically load words from a file…
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Writing your blog posts in Markdown with Postmarkdown

February 3, 2012

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on February 3, 2012.

Another thing we added to our new site, uploaded back at the end of December, was the ability to write our blog posts in Markdown, which is a text-to-html tool that allows you to write formatted text without actually having to write all the corresponding HTML. Markdown is used for the project wiki pages on GitHub, and can also be used for the project’s readme file.

Most of the time, I don’t like that HTML gets autogenerated for me, since I usually don’t get the results I want. We used to have the site (which was really the blog only) in WordPress, and I never used the autogenerated HTML. In fact, it was quite the opposite: I wrote every blog post in plain…
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Migrating your blog posts to Markdown with Upmark and Nokogiri

February 3, 2012

This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on February 3, 2012.

As I said in my last post, for our new site, we changed our blog engine from WordPress to the Postmarkdown gem. At the end of that post, I mentioned that we had to migrate the old posts from WordPress to Markdown.

To do this, we built a ruby script using the Upmark gem and the Nokogiri gem. Nokogiri is used for HTML and XML parsing, among other things, while Upmark is used to generate Markdown from a given HTML.

First, we exported our old blog posts from WordPress to an XML file that looks like this:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>


<rss
```
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