Rails again but actually making progress

(tags ruby, rails, web development, database)

I've been playing with Ruby on Rails again for my hobby blog. I was able to reformat my old database from PostgreSQL to Sqlite3 via manual Ruby scripting, because I find installing and maintaining PostgreSQL a hassle. Yes I know the installation has improved over the years, even on my preferred platform of Windows. (We'll see how much I miss the industrial-strength features later.)

I got three of the features I've been wanting for a while: readable urls, next and previous immediate post (which is like LiveJournal) and search. I created readable urls with the Rails Routing function. The next and previous functionality are from a simple database query. And search was pretty simple from the database function. It even search Japanese in UTF-8, w00t. Of course its the database doing the heavy lifting and not Ruby on Rails. I am worried though that the data input won't always be UTF-8 and thus corrupt my database.

Other things I want, in decreasing priority:

• Web-based editor.
• Permalink and link/image transformation system.
• Atom 1.0 based XML feed.
• Get my "we get signal" blogger posts into my system. (Blogger Backup Utility)
• Reconvert existing blog posts to HTML 4.0 or XML compliant formats.
• Text markup transformation ala Redcloth/Bluecloth.
• Fully CSS'd design

But my ultimate goal is to output to a static webhost. I'm so Web 1.0 like that. Will I use wget to make it static? If so, how can I deal with making the web page generation incrementally change?

Or I should just go for a dynamic web host. Really I gotta research these things one of these days.