About itsa

Itsa is intended to be a simple-to-use blog engine with the following features:

• All non-theme content is editable with any text editor
• Support for multi-language syntax highlighting
• Simple-to-understand code

I wrote it as a replacement for my old implementation of this idea, milagos, which is written using the Yesod framework. itsa is written using Snap, which I've found is lighter-weight.

Getting set up

Due to the fact that I'm using Hamlet templates, which are checked at compile time, changing the themes requires having a Haskell toolchain (ghc, cabal, etc.). I personally use hsenv for sandboxing, but cabal-dev or whatever works just as well; just clone the repository, set up your sandbox if you use one, and cabal install --only-dependencies.

To set up a development version of the server, run cabal install -fdevelopment and run dist/build/itsa/itsa; the development version is slower but will autoreload. To get a production version, just omit the -fdevelopment.

Data structure

The required directory structure looks like this:

• log/
• config.yml
• posts/
  • slug-1/
    • post.markdown
    • meta.yml
• pages/
  • page-slug/
    • page.markdwon
    • meta.yml

config.yml

The required fields of a config.yml file are:

• posts-per-page: The number of posts to display on a page.
• blog-title: The title, which will show up in various places.
• time-zone: The time zone to use when displaying post times.
• app-root: The 'base' URL for all links (i.e., http://blog.amateurtopologist.com/). Trailing slashes are OK.

.markdown

The post.markdown and page.markdown files use Pandoc markdown, which is a slight superset of regular markdown. The most salient extension is that you can do

```haskell
x :: Int
x = 3
```

and the code will be highlighted as Haskell (though see the code-language option for an alternative).

meta.yml

The slug is not in the meta.yml; instead, it is taken from the directory name.

The meta.yml file contains all the post/page metadata. For a post, the fields are as follos:

• title: The title of the post.
• tags: A list of the tags.
• draft: Whether the post is a draft; defaults to true.
• posted: The date at which this post was posted (if set to the future, the post will be queued). The format is 2012-03-27 19:00:00 EDT.
• code-language: If present, all non-inline code blocks will be highlighted using this language.

For pages, there are only two attribtues:

• title: The title of the page
• short-title: The 'short' title, to be used in the page list. Defaults to the title.