Aerial

Aerial is a simple, blogish, web application written in Sinatra. Designed for developers, there is no admin interface and no SQL database. Articles are written in your favorite text editor and versioned with Git. Comments are handled by Disqus (http://disqus.com). It uses Grit (http://github.com/mojombo/grit) to interface with local Git repositories.

Aerial also comes with a static site generator. Why, you ask? Well, static pages offer a lot of benefits: First, static pages load lightning fast. It also allows web browsers to cache files much more efficiently due to Last-Modified headers and such.

Aerial can now run on Heroku! Initially, Aerial didn't work on Heroku since the .git directory is completely obliterated on each deployment. With static pages and little help from a couple Rack middleware plugins, getting Aerial on Heroku is a snap.

Aerial was designed for small personal blogs and simple static websites such as marketing sites. The main goals are to provide a no-fuss alternative with a basic set features.

Aerial is still in active development.

Features

Pages and articles are managed thru git
Pages are represented in Haml templates
Articles are in Markdown format with embedded metadata
Comments are managed by Disqus (http://disqus.com)
Blog-like features: Recent Posts, Categories, Archives, and Tags
Static site generator
Works on Heroku!

Installation

$ gem install aerial
$ aerial install /home/user/myblog
# Navigate to <http://0.0.0.0:4567>

This will create a new directory and a few files, mainly the views, config files, and a sample article to get you started. Then, edit config.yml to your liking.

From Source

Aerial's Git repo is available on GitHub, which can be browsed at:

http://github.com/mattsears/aerial

and cloned with:

$ git clone git://github.com/mattsears/aerial.git
$ rake launch
# Navigate to <http://0.0.0.0:4567>

Requirements

sinatra (for awesomeness)
git (http://git-scm.com)
grit (interface to git)
yaml (for configuration)
rdiscount (markdown-to-html)
Haml (can easily be switch to erb, or whatever)

Todo

Improve bootstrap tasks
Add article limit setting to config.yml
Support atom feeds
Add support for including non article content (pages)
Add more details to this README