I’ve been playing around with Ruby for a while now and wanted to write
my own gem. I wanted to write something simple but useful. My idea was
to create a simple console gem that would alert a user when a new post
was created in a certain subreddit. Right now it’s hardcoded to one
subreddit, and I’m using Mac’s say
command to notify me when there’s a
new post. My first question is, is this even gem-worthy? I could turn
this into a simple Rails app, which might make things logistically
easier. But I really wanna write up a gem.
If I do decide to carry on with the project as a gem, there are a few
obstacles I have to get past. Right now I’m using whenever to run that
runs my script every minute. To update your cron jobs, you have to run
whenever --update-crontab
in the directory of the project in order to
set the cron job. This has become an issue for me, because I would like
to be able to make the gem usable on installation without having a user
do anything. So instead of having to run the command above, I’d like a
user to just be able to download the gem and then, eventually, choose
what subreddits and the frequency of the cron job (via a console menu).
Sorry for the length of the post, just looking for some input.