Bloghead

Linux & Windows builds:

Quick demo:

bloghead.mp4

Very early WIP. The goal is to eventually become a user-friendly static site generator that:

• Uses an SQLite database per site instead of collections of flat files
• Has a traditional web-based CMS interface
• Simplifies deployment to popular targets (GH/GL/SRHT Pages, Tilde/SDF-likes via rsync, etc.)
• Acts reasonably like a desktop program, with proper .bloghead filetype association

The average computer-literate person deserves to completely own their blog publishing pipeline in $current_year!

This also doubles as my daily therapy session to recover from workday-induced architectureastronomyphobia. That means rejecting abstraction until it hurts, then we can consider a minimum viable refactor. This is half useful software, half contrarian art piece.

Dev

Current dev dependencies:

• go
• lua: to run the djot-to-html script
• tcl/tk: for startup dialog/filepicker
• (optional) entr: for make watch
• (optional) mingw-w64: to cross-compile from Linux to Windows.

I've been developing mainly on Arch Linux, but the CI builds work on Debian 9 ("stretch") to ensure maximum glibc compatibiliy. Also cross-compiles to Windows just fine. MacOS is TODO.

make init-db
ln -s "$PWD/vendored/djot.lua" /usr/bin/djot.lua  # or anywhere in your $PATH
make watch

Runtime dependencies:

• For Windows: everything is included in the zip. Just extract and run bloghead.exe.
• For Linux: bloghead assumes these executables are available from your $PATH:
  • tclsh - must include tk too.
  • lua
  • djot.lua - this is included in the zip, just put it somewhere in your $PATH.

Things are especially messy right now. Proper desktop-friendly distribution will be done once core features are in place.

Update vendored djot lua script

cd djot && git pull && cd ..
go run ./cmd/vendordjot

Local build container

Although the Makefile works with plain Arch linux, there's a Dockerfile that's supposed to match the CI's build environment. Use it to quickly debug and iterate on CI tasks:

docker build -t bloghead .
docker run --rm -it bloghead bash

Linux desktop integration

They're in the ./freedesktop/ dir. Try editing the hardcoded paths there then stow freedesktop.

Prior art

Lektor is a heavy inspiration, but doesn't go far enough to accommodate non-developers IMHO.