This Blog

"This Blog" is a blogging engine made for people that like markdown and the command line. It's a single-user, no database application written in node.js.

Features

• Simple publishing mechanism - use a single command
• No database or static file servers - all data is kept in files
• Blog posts are single files and contain their own configuration
• Can handle multiple languages
• Can tag posts and dynamically build tag categories
• Posts can have their own templates or use the provided master

Installation

To use it, you will have to make 2 installations, one on your server and one on your local machine:

npm install this-blog

Usage

Setting up

Before you start it, you need to edit the settings.json file in the root directory. Your local and remote installation must have the same settings for these options:

remoteUrl:    "example.com"
remotePort:   80
password:     "icanhazcheezburger"
contentDirs:  ["posts", "templates", "static"]

You need to get these to be the same on your server and local installation. Everything else is configurable later. The remoteUrl and remotePort are the public URL and port of your blog. The password is used to authenticate you when you publish posts.

You can start your server by running

node blog.js -s 

on your server.

Publishing

To upload posts, images and templates start adding them in one of the contentDirs that you defined. Normally your posts would go in the posts directory, templates in the templates directory, but This Blog uses only the file extension to make difference between posts and other files. Any file with the .md extension will be treated like a post.

After you're done publish your changes by running

node blog.js -p 

on your local machine.

Configuration

Here's an overview of the configuration options in the settings.json file:

port:        The port for the node server to listen to (if you use a proxy)
remotePort:  The public port for your blog (should be 80)
remoteUrl:   The public URL of your blog
password:    Authentication password - needs to be the same
contentDirs: Dirs scanned for content changes before publishing
gaCode:      Google analytics key
postsUrl:    Url path for posts (with leading slash)
tagsUrl:     Url path for tags (with leading slash)
adminUrl:    Url path for publishing (passworded, with leading slash)
errorLog:    Error log filename 
maxExcerpts: Maximum number of posts shown on a tag/home page
pagination:  Maximum number of pagination links
languages:   List of languages - ["en", "mk"]
langinfo:    Hash of language names - {"en": "English", "mk": "Македонски"}
sitemenus:   List of menus that posts can appear in - ["bookmarks", "2011"]