== Introduction == 
I wanted to run little "gadgets" on the same server as my personal website.  "Gadgets" are mini apps that demonstrate 
something I've learned, usually JavaScript, a web API like del.icio.us or twitter, or maybe some CSS tricks.  Having 
these mini apps lets me test appearance and behavior in multiple browsers.  I picked the name "gadgets" after 
considering widgets, snippets, samples, and bits.   
The problem I ran into was I had to update a link every time I uploaded a new gadget.  I could make made a one-page CMS, 
or manage a site with all static files, which is what I was doing previously, but I wanted to try the sinatra framework 
and learn hpricot, so I settled on making a mini app to serve these demos called "demo generator". 
== Demo Generator == 
Demo Generator generates a landing page from a Github project/repo.  It uses some of the Github API and also does some 
page scraping to grab newly uploaded folders.  The problems this solved for me were:
 - I can create new runnable, javascript gadgets and don't need to manually add a link to the new gadget
 - Instead of a static files site, having a server application means I could return data to the gadget from a database 
 or the filesystem
 - This was a DRYer setup since I don't have to duplicate any data from the repo, I can just pull it down 
 programmatically.
 - sinatra and hpricot are very fast
 - I can take advantage of nice source code highlighting already provided by Github
== Dependencies ==
I made demo generator configurable so it should work with other github projects.  Using this on your own server requires 
the following gems:
 - sinatra
 - rack
 - hpricot
I have only tested this with Apache and the Passenger module installed.  A deploy.rb file is included to make deployment 
with Capistrano easy.  I'm not really sure if this will be useful to others, please share any feedback.
== How do I use demo generator for my gadgets? ==
 - Fork (or download) the "gadgets" project 
 - Create your own github repo for your gadgets
 - Change the values in "demo_generator.rb" to be your own github account and repo name
If you have the same gems installed, and use the same deployment environment as me, deployment should be easy.  Add new 
"gadgets" by adding a directory in the public folder of this sinatra app, then make sure an index.html is generated or 
created, and that your web server knows to serve that.  Once you upload new directories within your public dir, as long 
as they aren't in the list of excluded dirs (also configurable), a link will be made on the next page load of the demo 
generator to the new gadget.
== Author ==
Andy Atkinson
"gadgets" project
Linked up by Demo Generator
https://webandy.com
== Source == 
https://github.com/andyatkinson/gadgets/tree/master