FCGI Soup

A simple webserver made for bloggers with embedded devices such as the old Raspberry Pi.

Features

• Static file serving.
• Blog posts/articles.
• Basic templating.

Static file serving

Basically anything that doesn't have blog/ as subpath is a static file. If the URI refers to a folder, index.html is loaded. If the file couldn't be read, 404 is returned.

Articles

On startup, the file blog.list is loaded. This file contains entries for each blog post. Each entry has the following format: "<title>" "<author>" "<year>[-<month>[-<day>[ hour[:minute]]]]" "<file>" "<uri>".

Basic templating

It is easy to customize webpages with the Cinja templating library. The following templates are used by FCGI soup:

• main.html All HTML pages are wrapped in this template. There is only one string variable, BODY, which represents the page being wrapped.
• article\_list.html: This page is used to list all articles. It has a single variable, ARTICLES, which is a list. Each item of the list is a dictionary with URI, TITLE and DATE as variables. To iterate over the list, you must use a for loop.
• article.html This is the wrapper for all blog posts. There are a number of interesting variables:
  • PREV_URI and NEXT_URI: these are strings that link to the previous and next article.
  • PREV_TITLE and NEXT_TITLE: the titles of the previous and next article, respectively.
  • TITLE: the title of the current article`
  • AUTHOR: the name of the author
  • DATE: the date the article was created (or well, what is listed in the blog list, anyways). It is currently formatted as "%Y-%M-%D %h:%m".
  • BODY: the body of the article (unparsed).
  • COMMENTS: a list of comments on the article. These only include the top-level comments.
  • comment: a function (or rather, a template) that takes a single comment as parameter.
• comment.html: A template for a single comment.
  • AUTHOR: the name of the author of the comment.
  • DATE: the date when the comment was posted.
  • BODY: the contents of the comment.
  • ID: the ID of the comment.
  • REPLIES: a list containing replies to this comment.
  • comment: a function to parse the replies.
• error.html: A template that can be used in case something not nice occured.
  • STATUS: the status code of the response.
  • MESSAGE: a message describing the error.

For examples, see the www/ directory.

To post a comment, a form with the following parameters must be posted:

• author
• body
• (optionally) reply-to

Using FCGI Soup

You will need a proxy of some sort that supports (F)CGI. e.g. Apache has mod_fcgi.