cow-blog 0.2.0

by Brian Carper

This is a(nother) complete rewrite of my blog engine, written in Clojure using Compojure and PostgreSQL.

Version 0.1.0 of this code used Tokyo Cabinet. I ran it that way successfully for a year in hobby-production, but I don't advise you to do the same. There were issues with thread-safety and stability and it was a huge hack / proof of concept. Use it at your own risk.

Version 0.2.0 currently depends upon a highly experimental ORM-ish library called Oyako which I'm building at the same time I build this blog engine.

Purpose

This code runs my hobby-website. Its purpose is to teach me how to write webapps in Clojure, and to have fun while doing so.

The intended audience for this code is a knowledgeable Clojure programmer. User-friendliness is almost entirely lacking. Users posting comments might get semi-helpful error messages when (not if) something breaks, but as an admin, you'll get stacktraces.

Get the picture? I wouldn't use version even 0.2.0 of this code for anything you make money from. But it might be fun to play with.

Features

• Post tags, categories, comments
• Archives, with gratuitous tag cloud
• Markdown
• Gravatars
• RSS
• Lame spam filter
• Add/edit/delete posts/tags/categories via admin interface
• SyntaxHighlighter

Getting started

Clone this git repo, then cd into the directory and:

lein deps

Edit src/blog/config.clj to your tastes.

Look at (and run) blog.db.postgres.clj/init-db-postgres to create the tables in your database.

Use blog.db/create-user to create an admin user, or you'll never be able to do anything.

Once your tables are set up, then do this:

(require 'blog.server)
(blog.server/start)

Deploying

Right now I deploy this by running Emacs in SLIME. This is less than ideal. Doing it WAR-style is a possibility in the future. (Patches welcome.)

I use Apache to proxy to a running Jetty server. Documentation possibly forthcoming, or read here for an out-of-date writeup of my general strategy.

Bugs

Bugs are a certainty.

For bug reports, feedback, or suggestions, please open an issue on github.

LICENSE

See the LICENSE file.

Changelog

• June 20, 2010 - Rewrite again? No more Tokyo Cabinet. Now uses Postgres. Cows still missing.

• October 22, 2009 - Rewrite from scratch. No more CRUD. Tokyo Cabinet. Removed cows.

• April 12, 2009 - Updated to work on Compojure's bleeding-edge "ring" branch. Complete rewrite of the CRUD library. Overhauled mostly everything.

• March 27, 2009 - Initial release.