You write code for a living and now, you feel like you could use a blog to share your experience with others. Most of us have been there.
Starting your own blog isn't an easy task. If you've ever started one, you know how hard it is to stay focused.
You also want your blog to look like something that looks like you. Personality.
Because you write code for a living, you don't want to waste much time on your blog building everything from the ground up but you would also like to be able to change things, small HTML or CSS changes.
You might also want to show some code snippet that you've either created or found about working on something. You know how important code indentations and highlighting is to help visualize concept and logic. So you need to have that.
Well, Ecrire is the blog engine that can do it for you.
The editor is split in two halves. The left is where you write your post. The right is where you see a live preview of what you are writing as well as some tools to help you build each of your post.
This is where you will spend most of your time. The editor is plain but powerful: it's just HTML. Why would you want HTML to be abstracted from you? You probably know HTML really well and there's nothing more flexible than that.
Above the editor, there's 3 links: Write, Stylesheet and Javascript. Write let's you write HTML while Stylesheet and Javascript let you customize CSS and JS for this particular post. If you want to float an image on a specific paragraph, you can. If you want to have a small button that toggles something special, you can too. You're a developer, I'm sure you'll have ideas of your own on how to leverage those, I sure did!
When you open up the editor, the right hand side shows the live preview of your post. It updates as you type HTML and CSS. It's very useful when you try to tweak your post or when you move things around. The preview gives you exactly how your post will look like once you publish it, in real time.
There's two importers that you can use to help you write awesome posts. Images and partials.
You see the dashed box there, it does what it says: It let's you upload images by dropping them from your desktop onto the dashed box. As simple as that.
Once your file is uploaded to S3, you don't need to know where your file is, you can drag the image onto the textarea and the HTML tag will be generated for you at the place you drop it. Look for yourself.
If you've ever done some web development, you must know what partials are. They are small HTML snippet that you reuse on different pages.
Partials have an editor very similar to posts. They have their own HTML, CSS and Javascript that can be inserted in any post you wish. If you write about different topics and you would like to have a form on only certain pages, it becomes easy to do that with partials.
When you want to start using partials, it's as simple as working with images. You have a list of all your partials and you can drag and drop onto the textarea the partial you want, at the location you want in your text. Like the images, Ecrire will generate the HTML tag for you. And your partial will appear in your live preview like everything else.
You're a developer and you want to show code. And you want it to look awesome.
Ecrire comes with prism.js, a library that does code highlighting extremely well. It also supports a large array of languages and is very easy to extend to your own language if yours isn't supported.
Like everything else, code highlighting works in the live preview. Line numbers and all!
Like any blog engine, Ecrire saves as a draft by default so you can write your post without having the world seeing it.
When you're ready, simply press the arrow on the left of Save and click the publish button!
Customization is important and it shouldn't be hard to make minor changes to the look and feel of your blog. You should be able to infuse a dose of your personality without breaking a sweat. Ecrire was built using clean and modular HTML code. You can easily find your way around HTML, CSS and Javascript.
With this being said, theme has been implemented in Ecrire.
This project is still in its infancy and while everything you've read so far is working, there's still bugs, enhancements and features that are missing. Even though it's an alpha, this engine has been working flawlessly on http://pothibo.com for the last 2 months. So try it out, leave issues if you find any or even submit a PR, more the merrier!
All the information you need to install this blog engine is found on the Wiki.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014 pothibo
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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