Levissimo - A lightweight static blog generator

0.1.0

This is a very minimalistic static blog generator with a very simple and flexible page layout that is self-contained and doesn't rely on any external components, made to work on any platform (even text-based web browsers), that can easily be customized to fit into an existing website.

The focus of this project is to use all the available standards in other to generate a blog, without silly things like Markdown with a front-matter. Posts are written with plain HTML, just like the rest of the website layout, and the additional parameters are specified using standardized <meta> tags.

The default output folder is set to docs/, this way it can be easily deployed to GitHub Pages.

Just run make and the script will generate all the necessary files for deploying the website in the docs/ folder.

You must have installed all of the third-party libraries listed in cpanfile and also pngcrush >v1.7.22.

This software is very easy to setup and keep up-to-date since it uses Git to manage everything.

First of all you'll need to install all of the "REQUIREMENTS", then I encourage you to take a look at the contents of each of the "FOLDERS" and get used to the way this blog generator is structured and edit the configuration file.

Begin by grabbing the latest version of the software from the project repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/nathanpc/levissimo.git <yourblog>
$ cd <yourblog>

Then create a new repository with your GitHub account and set the origin URL to your repo's clone URL:

$ git remote set-url origin <yourblog_repo>

Now set up a upstream URL so that you'll be able to keep you blog up-to-date:

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/nathanpc/levissimo.git

Then open the .gitignore file in the root of the repo and remove the lines indicated by the comments:

############ REMOVE THIS ############
posts/
docs/
static/img/
############ REMOVE THIS ############

Push everything to your repo:

$ git push origin master
$ git push --all

Now you can start writing some blog posts, messing with the configuration and editing the website styling. After your done follow the instructions in "DEPLOYMENT" to learn how to easily generate your website and push it to GitHub Pages.

Periodically check for updates to the generator by running:

$ make update

Happy blogging!

This project has a very simple folder layout for you to use and customize as needed.

static/

Where all your static files should be placed. This folder will be copied as-is with its structure preserved to the output folder.

template/

Where all the important website templates for things like page layout and etc should be.

posts/

Where you should place your posts.

docs/

The output folder where your finalized website should reside.

Here's an example post to get you started:

<meta name="title" content="Some Interesting Title">
<meta name="author" content="Your Name Here">
<meta name="created" content="2019-03-22"> <!-- YYYY-MM-DD -->

<p>This is a simple paragraph.</p>

<!-- This is how a image should be declared. -->
<p class="image-container"><img src="/img/test.jpg"></p>

<p>Photo albums are cool, so here's one:</p>

<nav class="album">
  <div class="arrow">&lt;</div>
  <section>
    <figure class="current">
      <img src="/img/1.jpg">
      <figcaption>First image</figcaption>
    </figure>
    <figure>
      <img src="/img/2.jpg">
      <figcaption>Second image.</figcaption>
    </figure>
  </section>
  <div class="arrow">&gt;</div>
</nav>

<p>Closing paragraph.</p>

As you can clearly see, it's very simple to write a post and you use plain old HTML for everything. No fancy markup. For more examples of blog posts check out the author's blog: https://github.com/nathanpc/currentflow.net/tree/master/posts

Deploying the blog should be extremely simple, the automated way of doing it, which is optimized for GitHub Pages and will already resize the original images and optimze the output ones, is to just run ./bin/deploy.sh "Commit message".

Currently there are no tests, so this section is here for future updates.

To make sure everything is perfect for deployment you can run make test, which will run all the unit tests to make sure that you have a working system.

This project is licensed under the MIT license. For more information please read the LICENSE file in the project root.

Nathan Campos <nathanpc@dreamintech.net>

Copyright (c) 2019- Nathan Campos.