mkblog.sh

mkblog.sh

mkblog.sh is a simple blogging system, written in sh. It allows you to write blog posts in Markdown and compile them into a nice HTML site with a single command.

Installation (optional)

You can just run ./mkblog.sh without installing it. But if you prefer, you can install it executing sudo make install.

To uninstall it execute sudo make uninstall.

Usage

First, create a skeleton for your new blog using mkblog.sh init <directory>. This will start a setup wizard to allow you to configure your blog. To change an answer given to the wizard, just change the relevant export in the variables subdirectory. You can also add custom variables to use in your template.

To add content to your blog, use mkblog.sh new. This requires two arguments: first, what type of content you want (currently one of page for an ordinary page and post for a blog post) and the directory where the blog currently lives. This will prompt you for a title for the page or post you want to add. If a page or post by the title you give exists already, you will have the option to overwrite it. The new post or page will be opened in your editor, which is determined as follows:

• If you have the VISUAL environment variable set, the script will use whatever it refers to as your editor.
• If you don't have VISUAL set, but have EDITOR set instead, the script will use that.
• Otherwise, the script will use vi.

If you want to add page source files manually, add Markdown files to the pages subdirectory. The title of the resulting page will be the same as the file, minus the extension. If you want to add blog post source files manually, add Markdown files to the posts subdirectory; make sure you follow the yyyy-mm-dd-time-title.md naming convention. For example: 2016-02-04-17:00-Hello, world!.md. It is fine to leave out the time, as long as the amount of dashes match up. Feel free to name your file 2016-02-04--Untimed article.md if you do not want to add a time.

Then, run mkblog.sh build <directory> to build your blog. The HTML will be placed in a subdirectory named build in the directory you are building.

To edit what your blog looks like, just edit templates/header.html and templates/footer.html according to your wishes. However, try to not remove the skip div element, as it aids accessibility.

Example directory structure

If you are doing everything right, your blog directory should look like this.

.
├── pages
│   ├── About.md
│   └── Contact.md
├── posts
│   ├── 2016-02-06-17:00-Hello again.md
│   └── 2016-02-04--Hello, world!.md
├── templates
│   ├── footer.html
│   └── header.html
└── variables

Dependencies

Aside from standard tooling, mkblog.sh has two dependencies:

• envsubst, which is part of GNU Gettext.
• A Markdown parser that parses standard input and sends the HTML to standard output.

By default, mkblog.sh assumes that the parser program is named "markdown". You can change this by editing the var_mdproc variable in the variables file. We recommend discount as a parser program (which conveniently does the right thing by default).

Tip

This repository includes a convenient Makefile which can help you speed things up. You only need to change its BLOGDIR variable to point to the blog directory you created with the mkblog.sh init command. That way you can execute make page, make post and so on instead of typing long instructions like ./mkblog.sh new post blogdir each time.

Known limitations

Blog titles and blog subtitles cannot contain double quotes anywhere - this will cause unpredictable results if you try.

License

mkblog.sh is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3+. Its output is not copyrighted.