SIMPLE BLOG PLATFORM

Why?

Literally - because I can.

I know that there are tons of solutions for handling blog, but I wanted to have mine :)

For who?

As this is really "bare" it is for developers who actually understands a bit of programming and services. For sure not for 'normal' people from UI world.

Currently I am running a blog using this "platform": showpy.tech

I am writing my new posts in the IDE, I am publishing new ones using fully set up bitbucket pipelines, it:

Builds new docker image
Push docker image to container registry
Later container is update on the running instance
Cache is invalidated (only the / and /reading-list*) paths - as this is the only one that change often.

The whole setup took me like couple of hours - including writing this README and the blog platform itself.

Benefits?

No database
No nothing - only this docker image

How use it?

docker-compose up -d

Go to http://localhost:8031

You should see samples posts.

    {
      "title": "Sample Post",
      "slug": "sample-post",
      "date": "2019/07/04",
      "time": "15:49",
      "author": "Some Test",
      "intro": "And this is intro/subtitle"
    }

Posts are list there - so extend the list not replace.

Btw. I have no pagination yet - but who cares; only few of blogs has more than 100 posts. Usually people lost enthusiasm lot earlier.

After changes - you need to rebuild image and restart application. It can be very nicely incorporated into CI/CD - this what I am doing.

To change bg image & configuration

Change the static/img/home-bg.jpg to whatever you like. Same story with favicon.ico -> pyt there whatever you like. To add image to your posts - add them under static/img/posts (you can organize this on your own);

There's an example of how to do it in sample-post.md.

In the config/base.py file you can find:

BLOG_SETTINGS = {
    'title': 'sample.blog',
    'subtitle': 'everything you want to know',
}

You can change that - to meet your needs. It will be displayed on few places in the blog page, the most important is of course the welcome text on you blog.

How to add new page

Adding new page can be describe in 3 steps:

You need too add new view handler like this:

@app.route('/about/')
@jinja.template('about.html')
async def about(request):
    return {
        'settings': BLOG_SETTINGS
    }

in the app.py file.

You need to add new template, simply create about.html file in templates directory. As we are using jinja2 here, your template should look like this initially:

{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block content %}
  <p>Put some content here</p>
{% endblock %}

Add new page to menu - whatever you like, but menu is a good first choice:

Go to templates/base.html file and there find  comment, few lines under you have those li elements that you need to extend:

<li class="nav-item">
<a class="nav-link" href="/about/">About</a>
</li>

That's all - after app reload (docker-compose restart) you should see new page.

How to add new blog post

Adding posts are done manually in the code - so it is for old pricks like me (no UI here).

So you need to create markdown file in content/ directory in the right date location, so content/2017/07/04/some-slug.md.

After you create the content file, go and open posts.json file and add there meta information about post you just created.

Later on you can update the markdown file with the content. Why markdown? Cause I believe it is the fastest way of creating documents that actually looks nice. Of course we can use html WYSIWYG editors to create nice looking blog posts - but I didn't really like it - well probably just me.

Others

I am using free Clean Blog template Great work guys!

Somebody asked me: Why no markdown -> html conversion and server statics instead? Well - IT IS NO FUN.

You can always write me a note here: sebastian@trurl.it

opalczynski/simple-blog-platform