indieweb-bashblog

A single Bash script to create blogs; brought into the realm of the IndieWeb's favourite technologies.

I am a long time fan of the original bashblog by cfenollosa; it is a "very, very simple way to post entries to a blog by using a public folder on my server, without any special requirements and dependencies". And works on GNU/Linux, OSX and BSD ;^)

How simple? Just type ./bb.sh post and start writing your blogpost.

What's new

• adjusted the semantic HTML, avoiding divs and making it valid in the eyes of w3
• added basic Microformats
• prompt creating code for one Webmention before editing
• support for automatically sending said Webmention after posting
• support for displaying Webmentions on the page, using webmention.js
• replaced default CSS with that of bearblog
• added Open Heart protocol

Tipps

I've found it's best to use this with Markdown, though HTML is also possible.

Be sure to run

./bb.sh rebuild

after posting; there are some errors that can come up after a post has been published (this is a general bashblog issue) but they are easily resolved like this.

Usage

Download the code and copy bb.sh into a public folder (for example, $HOME/public_html/blog) and run

./bb.sh

This will show the available commands. If the file is not executable, type chmod +x bb.sh and retry.

Before creating your first post, you may want to configure the blog settings (title, author, etc). Read the Configuration section below for more information

To create your first post, just run:

./bb.sh post

It will try to use Markdown, if installed. To force HTML:

./bb.sh post -html

The script will handle the rest.

When you're done, access the public URL for that folder (e.g. http://server.com/~username/blog) and you should see the index file and a new page for that post!

Original Features

• Ultra simple usage: Just type a post with your favorite editor and the script does the rest. No templating.
• No installation required. Download bb.sh and start blogging.
• Zero dependencies. It runs just on base utils (date, basename, grep, sed, head, etc)
• GNU/Linux, BSD and OSX compatible out of the box, no need for GNU coreutils on a Mac. It does some magic to autodetect which command switches it needs to run depending on your system.
• All content is static. You only need shell access to a machine with a public web folder. Tip: advanced users could mount a remote public folder via ftpfs and run this script locally
• Allows drafts, includes a simple but clean stylesheet, generates the RSS file automatically.
• Support for tags/categories
• Support for Markdown, Disqus comments, Twitter, Feedburner, Google Analytics.
• The project is still maintained as of 2016. Bugs are fixed, and new features are considered (see "Contributing")
• Everything stored in a single ~1k lines bash script, how cool is that?! ;)

Configuration

Configuration is not required for a test drive, but if you plan on running your blog with bashblog, you will want to change the default titles, author names, etc, to match your own.

There are two ways to configure the blog strings:

• Edit bb.sh and modify the variables in the global_variables() function
• Create a .config file with your configuration values -- useful if you don't want to touch the script and be able to update it regularly with git

The software will load the values in the script first, then overwrite them with the values in the .config file. This means that you don't need to define all variables in the config file, only those which you need to override from the defaults.

The format of the .config file is just one variablename="value" per line, just like in the global_variables() function. Please remember: quote the values, do not declare a variable with the dollar sign, do not use spaces around the equal sign.

bashblog uses the $EDITOR environment value to open the text editor.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.