Recompiling Sphinx Documentation While Writing
I first got the inspiration to make a personal wiki when I saw Nikita Voloboev's Everything I Know.
There's a huge amount of information in here. While it may not be necessarily useful to anybody but himself, it's impressive to see somebody brain dump so much into a singular place. So, I started creating my own.
I opted to use Sphinx with Markdown support, but the recompilation process is a pain to do manually. I'm used to writing code on a Rails server, or using something like JRebel for hotswapping Java code. Having to manually compile just...sucks.
Guard to the rescue. Guard is a utility written in Ruby that can watch over certain directories and act on them as required. I used Guard to run a basic HTTP server to serve the site on port 8000, then watch my source files for changes and automatically run make as required.
The code is available to download as a GitHub Gist.