smallblog.lua

A small static blogging platform in the style of jekyll

Smallblog takes markdown files organized as blog/year/month/day/post.md and generates an index page containing the latest few posts, and a simple way to navigate all posts. Smallblog must be re-ran every time you add or modify a post to regenerate the site (in the spirit of static blogging.) An example site may be found here.

Dependencies

Smallblog requires a markdown parser. I currently use and recommend Discount, which is written in C. If you're not familiar with markdown, there is a good tutorial on Wikipedia, available here.

Lua libraries

• LuaPosix
• lyaml
• lua-resty-template
• markdown

Any lua markdown library that conforms to post.html = markdown(post.text) will currently work. Currently lua-discount and markdown are supported.

Installation

cd ~/public_html/
mkdir blog
cp -R static/ templates/ blog/
mkdir tags
cp smallblog.conf.sample blog/smallblog.conf
echo "test" > blog/2013/08/16/test.md

Installation is simple. Just make a blog directory on your server, and copy the static/ and templates/ directories into it. File hierarchy under blog is in the form of blog/year/month/date/post.md. Posts must have a .md extension or they will be ignored. Multiple posts on the same date will be sorted by last modified timestamp (ls -t.)

Usage

cd ~/public_html/blog/
lua smallblog.lua

To run smallblog, simply go to the folder that contains your blog, and run smallblog in that directory. It will generate the main page (index.html) in the current directory by parsing the date hierarchy folders for markdown (.md) files.

To use the tags features, include a tags: line in your post followed by a list of tags to apply to your post.

Configuration

Smallblog should be configured via the site specific smallblog.conf. The configuration for the example site is provided in smallblog.conf.sample.

Theming

Smallblog uses the same template system as jekyll. The default smallblog template is the jekyll default.

Posts take the format of:

    <p><div class="post">
    <h3 class="title"><a href'/blog/year/month/day/post.html'>Title</a></h3>
    <p class="meta">Date: year-month-day time</p>
    <p>Post text</p>
    </div></p>

The site should be wrapped in a <div class="site"> and contains the standard <div class="header">, <div class="footer">, and <div class="contact"> for the header, footer, and footer contact information styling respectively. A static/local.css is provided to allow for minor changes without modifying the theme.

Smallblog also employs lua-resty-template to generate pages. Any of the tmpl files in templates/ may be freely modified.

Bugs

Smallblog.lua is a rewrite of smallblog.sh and smallblog.pl. It should still be largely compatible. Please file an issue if you find any bugs.

License

Smallblog is released under the ISC (2-BSD) license. Please see LICENSE for the full text.