This is danny.is. It's a Sinatra application that parses markdown files and turns them into a simple blog. It was thrown together in a day and so is a little rough around the edges. Why did I build this instead of using a static site genrator like Middleman? Well, for a number of reasons:
- I want absolute control over everything. I'm not a fan of magic unless I understand it.
- I wanted an app, rather than a static site. Although I don;t do much at the moment, I might want to add some dynamic stuff in the future.
- I wanted a simple way of including images and din't fancy hacking Middleman.
- I want a place to play about with ruby and SASS/CSS.
Although it's not really intended for general consumption (the world really doesn't need another markdown > blog engine), you can use it like this...
I'm using Guard, so you can just run:
bundle install
bundle exec rackup
And head to http://localhost:3000.
To publish a new post, put it in /articles with a name like 20130203-some-post-or-other.md. The only part of the filename that matters is the date, which is in the form YYYYMMDD-. This is used to order the posts correctly. Any articles with a date in the future will only be published at midnight on that date.
Each page must contain some special meatdata for it to be correctly rendered - the post's title, slug and post ID. The post ID must be unique, but the slug and title don't need to be:
title: This is the Second Post
slug: no-2
post_id: 1
#!!====================================
The rest of the article...
Posts should be written in markdown, and the site supports the following PHP-markdown style features:
- Tables
- Fenced codeblocks with syntax highlighting.
- Strikethrough (with
~~something~~). - Superscript (with
2^nd). - Underlines (with
_underlined_). - Highlighting (with
==highlighted==). - Footnotes (with
Something[^1]and then[^1]: This is a footnote).
In addition, two special tags are available:
{{gist:http://gist.github.com/name/000}}
will instert the code to display the gist, and
{{image: 1}}
will insert an image with a caption (see below). Note that {{imageraw:1}} is also available and will just inser the image, without wrapping it in a <figure> tag or adding a caption.
I wanted an easy way to save a series of images or screenshots and then insert them into an article where appropriate. Although you can happily use a normal markdown image tag, if you save images in the /public/article-images directory with a filename like this:
2-3-Some-image-description.png
then it's possible to use the {{image:1}} syntax above to insert them into articles. The first number in the filename is the post_id or the relevant post. The second number is the image number, ahile the remainder of the filename will be used as the figure caption. The image above could be inserted into the article (with post_id: 2) using {{image:3}}. It would have a caption of Some image description.
Create a local feature branch based on master.
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout -b <branch-name>
Rebase frequently to incorporate upstream changes.
git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master
Resolve conflicts. When feature is complete and tests pass, stage the changes.
git add --all
When you've staged the changes, commit them.
git status
git commit --verbose
Write a good commit message.
If you've created more than one commit, use a rebase to squash them into cohesive commits with good messages:
git rebase -i origin/master
Share your branch.
git push --force origin <branch-name>
Subit a pull request on github. (Assumes you have the hub gem installed).
git pull-request
View a list of new commits. View changed files. Merge branch into master.
git log origin/master..<branch-name>
git diff --stat origin/master
git checkout master
git merge <branch-name> --ff-only
git push
Delete your remote feature branch.
git push origin --delete <branch-name>
Delete your local feature branch.
git branch --delete <branch-name>
Clearley this is a very personal project and is a work in progress. Because it's just intended for me to use, there isn't a great deal of error handling built in. That said, feel free to clone/fork and use it yourself.
Thing