This is Lame Blog.

A small script that I wrote to maintain my blog on the web. I did not use another blog system, because I had different requirements than other people have.

I wanted:

• To support off-line editing. Since for long periods of time I might not have an internet connection.

• To be able to edit my blog entries with my choice editor, not using some integrated tool.

• To keep my old .txt file format for my entries.

• To do some minimal processing on the input.

Configuration

To configure LameBlog, you must create a file config.xml, which looks like this:

	<?xml version="1.0"?>
	<config
	    Author="Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnome.org)"
	    BlogDirectory="/home/miguel/activity"
	    BlogFileName="index.html"
	    BlogWebDirectory="http://tirania.org/blog/"
	    BlogImageBasedir="http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel"
	    Copyright="Miguel de Icaza"
	    Description="Miguel de Icaza's web log"
	    ManagingEditor="miguel@gnome.org"
	    Title="Miguel de Icaza"
	    RSSFileName="miguel"
	    InputEncoding="utf-8"
	    OutputEncoding="utf-8"
	    AnalyticsStub="analytics"
	    CommentsStub="comments"
	    ImageDirectory="/path/to/images"
	    ThumbnailCommand="shell-command-for-thumbnail source={0} thumbnail={1}"
	/>

The various parameters should be self explanatory.

It looks for blog entries in:

~/activity/YYYY/mmm-dd{-N}.{html|txt}

For example:

~/activity/2003/oct-01.html

For files with the HTML ending, it assumes that the title for the blog entry will be the first line (which should be tagged with <h1>title</h1>).

This means:

<h1>This is my Title</h1>

For text files, the first line should be formatted like this:

@This is my Title

To add multiple entries per day, append a -N to the entry:

~/activity/2003/oct-01-1.html ~/activity/2003/oct-01-2.html

For historic reasons, it generates an all.html (compatibility with old permalinks) and also now it generates per-day permalink entries in the archive/ directory.

To run, you must type:

make

To upload, edit the settings on the Makefile, and type:

make push

The result is then pushed to a server with rsync.

The AnalyticsStub is the file provided to you by Google as the stub that you must insert.

Lame Blog also now supports Markdown-formatted files as blog entries. They take the .md extension, and are regular Markdown format. You can use the h1 Markdown tag (#) to denote the title on the first line as well, because Markdown files are first processed by MarkdownSharp into HTML, and then loaded as .html files would be. MarkdownSharp is courtesy of Stack Overflow, and can be found at http://code.google.com/p/markdownsharp/.

Commands

The following commands can be used in your individual blog entries:

Command	Action
#include file	Will include the contents of "file" into the blog entry
#pic filename,caption	Will generate the code to center the image stored in filename with the given caption.This emits an HTML anchor to pic.php providing filename and caption as GET parameters.
#comment, #comments	Will enable the entry to have comments. To activate comments, you need to get a comment hosting provider,and then paste the stub into the file comments', or the file referenced in the config.xml` CommentsStub field
#thumbnail filename caption	A static alternative to #pic. This looks for filename underneath ImageDirectory, copies filename into the archive directory, creates a thumbnail for filename by invoking ThumbnailCommand, and generates HTML that is an <a><img/></a> to the thumbnail which targets the full-size image. Caption is used as the alt and title text of the <img/>. A possible ThumbnailCommand value is: convert -size 400x300 {0} -resize 400x300 +profile "*" {1} which generates a 400x300 pixel thumbnail of the input file.

Templates

The main blog template is the file template, this contains the general layout of the file and will do substitutious on a number of fields:

Main template: template file

@TITLE@ : The title of the blog, this becomes the <title>

@DESCRIPTION@

@ANALYTICS@ : Substituted with the contents specified in the config file for "Analytics"

@BASEDIR@

@BLOGWEBDIR@

@RSSFILENAME@

@EDITOR@ : Replaced with the string in ManagingEditor from the config file

@BLOG_ARTICLES@ : Lists the articles that you want to link, these are not the blog entries, but thinks that you want on your sidebar.

@BLOG_ENTRIES@ : The blog entries rendered.

Per entry template: entry file. @ENTRY_ID@

@ENTRY_ANCHOR@ : Anchor used to target an entry.

@ENTRY_PATH@

@ENTRY_NAVIGATION@: Produces HTML to move to the previous/main/next blog entries

@ENTRY_PERMALINK@

@ENTRY_CAPTION@

@ENTRY_CAPTION_ENC@

@BASEDIR@

@BASEIMAGES@

@COPYRIGHT@

@ENTRY_CATEGORY@

@ENTRY_DATECAPTION@

@ENTRY_CATEGORY_PATHS@

@BLOGWEBDIR@

@ENTRY_URL_PERMALINK@

@ENTRY_SPECIFIC@

Enjoy,
Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)