Scanty, a really small blog

NOTE: the scanty microblog with jabber posting have been moved to branch jabbit.

Overview

Scanty is blogging software. Software for my blog, to be exact: adam.blog.heroku.com

It is not a blogging engine, but it’s small and easy to modify, so it could be the starting point for your blog, too.

Features

• Posts (shock!)
• Tags
• Textile (via RedCloth)
• Browser side syntax highlight (via shjs shjs.sourceforge.net)
• Comments via Disqus
• Dr. Nic’s Github Badge
• Atom feed
• Web framework = Sinatra
• ORM = Sequel
• Full capistrano deployment, I mean full: mysql db creation, vhost creation

Dependencies

None, everything you need is vendored: Sinatra, Sequel, RedCloth.

Setup

Edit main.rb and change the Blog title and header and the FRIENDS constant to your liking. For security purposes, change the admin password and the admin cookie key and value in Capfile for deployment. These last two can be set to any random value you like, just choose something other than the default.

Then run the server:

  $ ruby main.rb

And visit: localhost:4567/

Log in with the password you selected, then click New Post. The rest should be self-explanatory.

TODO: this is OLD remove: In production, you’ll probably want to run "rake start" to start (and restart) the server. Change the value of "port" at the top of the Rakefile to run on a different port.

Database

The default is a SQLite file named blog.db. To use something else, see config.yml.sample or change uri at the top of main.rb

The database will be created automatically when the server is executed.

Comments

There are no comments by default. If you wish to activate comments, create an account and a website on Disqus (disqus.com) and enter the website shortname as the :disqus_shortname value in the Blog config struct.

Full deploy with passenger

we are using capistrano, capitate and capinatra for full deployment to configure a mysql db and set a vhost for apache passenger.

$ cap deploy:setup CAPINATRA=y

set CAPINATRA to anything not nil, it’s a hack since capinatra collapses with capistrano and capitate throwing non set variables exceptions

Then deploy the blog with:

$ cap deploy

Import data

Christopher Swenson has a Wordpress importer: github.com/swenson/scanty_wordpress_import

Other kinds of data can be imported easily, take a look at the rake task :import for an example of loading from a YAML file with field names that match the database schema.

NOTE: I was comming from feather, you find how I imported my articles from there in feather rake an capistrano tasks

CSS

I am using an adapted flashy template, you might want to use another

Meta

Written by Adam Wiggins

Patches contributed by: Christopher Swenson

Released under the MIT License: www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

github.com/adamwiggins/keen

adam.blog.heroku.com/