blogator

Static blog generator

Our objectives about blogging are

text editor over editing text in browser
simple templating engine over WYSIWYG editors
dedicated source control system over primitive publishing mechanisms
static site hosting over dynamic hosting where it is possible

To serve it we provide simple Python script that will generates content from markdown templates.

To start use it you need to perform just few steps

Download blogator script
Install dependencies with pip3 install markdown and pip3 install pystache commands
Create file BLOG_FILE that will describe your blog. It could be as simple as

title: Blogging annotation: keep calm and blog on posts: intro.md history.md
Create files with posts for intro.md, history.md. The could be as simple as

title: About blog My blog entry
Generate content: python3 blogator.py BLOG_FILE -target OUTPUT_DIR.
Done! Generated content is now in OUTPUT_DIR.

Blog File Options

You can specify next basic options in your BLOG_FILE

title: title of your blog that could be shown on blog pages.
annotation: short description that could be show on your pages.
favicon-file: file from your local file system that could be used as a favicon. Could not be used together with favicon attribute.
favicon-url: url to the image that could be used as favicon. Could not be used together with favicon-file attribute.
posts: lists of files where posts stored

See blog file sample

Post File Options

You can specify next basic options in your BLOG_FILE

title: title of the post that could be displayed on the page, used to create links, etc.
brief: brief content that would be displayed on index page. If no brief present whole post will be shown.
short_title: shorten title that could be used to crete links, etc.
link_base: link to the post.
published: date of publishing that could be displayed on pages, used for sorting, etc. Use %Y-%m-%d format to specify it, like 2011-10-26.

Website Trafic's Statistic

We support trafic's statistic throw integration with Google Analytics. To add it to your blog

Sign up to the Google Analytics.
Get your Tracking ID.
Use this id as value for ganalitics in blog meta.

Comments

We support post comments throw integration with Disqus. To add comments to your blog

Sign up to the Disqus
Go to Add Disqus to Your Site page and fill form on that page
Finish form on that page
Choose Universal code
Find your discus code at line var disqus_shortname = 'YOUR_CODE';
Use this code for setting disqus value in blog meta.

Hosting

One of hosting options could be GitHub pages. It's free and supports domains in format YOUR_ID.github.io or your custom domain. To host there

[Create Github account] github-new
Create repository YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME.github.io
Push generated content to master branch of your repo

For details please wisit GitHub pages

Workflow

You can use any workflow to work with blogator. Here is one based on git branches

Prerequirements:

python 3.2.+ installed
dependencies (markdown, pystache) installed
git installed
github account created

Create new repositiry on github
Create new directory for your blog
```
    mkdir test-blog
```
Change your directory to newly created
```
    cd test-blog
```

Download blogator script

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/st-kurilin/blogator/master/blogator.py > blogator.py

Create place to store your blog's raw content. src directory will be created. raw branch will be used.
```
    git clone -b src --single-branch YOUR_GITHUB_REPO raw
```
Create place to store your blog's generated content. site directory will be created. master branch will be used.
```
    git clone -b master --single-branch YOUR_GITHUB_REPO site
```
Create all needed files in src directory. Including filling you blog meta file and posts. You can make commits and pushes when you need them.
```
    echo "title: Hello world" > src/blog
```
Run blogator script to generate content
```
    python3 src/blog -target site
```
Commit and push your site directory content.

Python Note

We use Python 3.4.1 for development. We do not test it on other Python versions. I assume that it should work fine for Python >= 3.2. Dependencies could be installed with pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

Contribute

Preretirements are:

Installed git and created github account
Installed Python 3.4.+, pip3, pylint

To make you changes please follow next steps

Fork https://github.com/st-kurilin/blogator
Run pip3 install -r requirements.txt to install all dependencies
Make your changes. We use blogator_src as a main script. To build a distributable script run build.py.
Make sure you pass tests from blogator_test.py. You can add more there as well.
Run pylint and make sure you leave the project better than you found it
Create a pull request