Blogit

This script aims at building a static blog above a git repo. This way, you can use git abilities to have full archives and backups of your blog. Many scripts aims at doing this, and this is just one more. I needed something more personal and fitted to my needs, so I came up with this code. It's not very beautiful, can mostly be optimized but it's working for me. It may not be fitted to your needs, but it's up to you to see it.

This script is just a python script that should be run as a git hook. You can see a working version at http://phyks.me and the repository behind it is publicly viewable at http://git.phyks.me/Blog. You should browse this repository for example configuration and usage if you are interested by this script.

This script has been developped by Phyks (phyks@phyks.me). For any suggestion or remark, please send me an e-mail.

Installation

1. Clone this repo.
2. Clear the .git directory and initialize a new empty git repo to store your blog.
3. Move the pre-commit.py script to .git/hooks/pre-commit
4. Edit the raw/params and edit it to fit your needs.
5. The raw folder comes with an example of blog architecture. Delete it and make your own.
6. You are ready to go !

Params

Available options in raw/params are :

• BLOG_TITLE : The title of the blog, to display in the <title> element in rendered pages.
• NB_ARTICLES_INDEX : Number of articles to display on index page.
• BLOG_URL : Your blog base URL.
• IGNORE_FILES : A comma-separated list of files to ignore.
• WEBMASTER : Webmaster e-mail to put in RSS feed.
• LANGUAGE : Language param to put in RSS feed.
• DESCRIPTION : Blog description, for the RSS feed.
• COPYRIGHT : Copyright information, for the RSS feed.
• SEARCH : comma-separated list of elements to search for and replaced (custom regex, see code for more info)
• REPLACE : corresponding elements for replacement.

Usage

This script will use three folders:

• raw/ will contain your raw files
• blog/ will contain the fully generated files to serve via your http server
• gen/ will store temporary intermediate files

All the files you have to edit are located in the raw/ folder. It contains by default an example version of a blog. You should start by renaming it and making your own.

Articles can be edited in HTML directly or in Markdown. They must be located in a raw/year/month folder, according to their date of publication and end with .html for html articles and .md for markdown articles. The basic content of an article is: <!-- @author=AUTHOR_NAME @date=DDMMYYYY-HHMM @title=TITLE @tags=TAGS --> CONTENT

where TAGS is a comma-separated list. Tags are automatically created if they do not exist yet. The HTML comment must be at the beginning of the document and is parsed to set the metadata of the article.

CONTENT is then either a HTML string or a markdown formatted one.

You can ignore an article to not make it publicly visible during redaction, simply by adding a .ignore extension.

When you finish editing your article, you can add the files to git and commit, to launch the script. You can also manually call the script with the --force-regen option if you want to rebuild your entire blog.

Header file

You can use the @blog_url syntax anywhere. It will be replaced by the URL of the blog, as defined in the parameters (and this is useful to include CSS etc.).

You can also use @tags that will be replaced by the list of tags and @articles for the list of last articles.

Static files

In static files, in raw folder (such as divers.html in the demo code), you can use #base_url that will be replaced by the base url of the blog, as defined in the parameters. This is useful to make some links.

Alternatives

There exist many alternatives to this script, but they didn't fit my needs (and were not all tested) :

• fugitive : http://shebang.ws/fugitive-readme.html
• Jekyll : http://jekyllrb.com/ and Oktopress : http://octopress.org/
• Blogofile : http://www.blogofile.com/

LICENSE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"THE NO-ALCOHOL BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): Phyks
(webmaster@phyks.me) wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
can do whatever you want with this stuff (and you can also do whatever you
want with this stuff without retaining it, but that's not cool...). If we
meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a
<del>beer</del> soda in return.  Phyks
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------