DIYBlog

Download

codeberg.org/andybalaam/DIYBlog/releases

Motivation

My webspace only supports FTP uploads, with no dynamic scripting languages or anything like that, but I still wanted to write a blog (with an RSS feed), and I wanted to be in full control of its appearance, and of the data so that I can migrate to a different solution in the future if I want. I couldn't find any software on the web that suited my purposes, so after a little bit of messing around I came up with a home-grown solution: DIYBlog (meaning Do-it-yourself blog).

DIYBlog is Free Software, released under the Gnu GPL. See the file COPYING.txt for details.

How it works

DIYBlog consists of 2 different pieces of code: an optional jEdit macro, and a Python script. The idea is that you write your blog in simple RSS, that looks like this:

<item>
    <title>RSS working?</title>
    <pubDate>Mon, 13 June 2005 17:17:00</pubDate>
    <description><p>I think I've managed to work out a system to make RSS work.
    Basically I write my blog entries into a raw RSS file, and then run a little Python
    script to add ids, links etc. and generate an HTML page from that.  It's been a hassle
    to write (mainly due to timezones, which I've now decided to ignore) and if anyone's
    interested in some highly-customisable blogging software that only requires FTP on
    your web host, get in touch, especially if you're the kind of person who thinks its
    cool to hand-code your RSS.</p></description>
</item>

(Plus a little bit of extra stuff at the beginning to give the title of the blog, your name etc.) The jEdit macro just creates a little template, filling in today's date for you, and putting your cursor in the middle of the title tags, ready for you to start typing. I have the macro bound to the Ctrl-B key, so to write a new blog entry I just press that and start typing.

When you've finished writing your blog entry, simply run the Python script and it will add some tags to your RSS (guid and link tags for any entries missing them), and also generate an HTML page containing your blog entries.

To alter the appearance of your blog, simply modify the HTML template that is used to generate the HTML page.

Usage

• Download and unzip the DIYBlog zip file.
• Modify the file template.html to look like how you want your blog to look. Everything between "<!-- BEGIN ITEM TEMPLATE -->" and "<!-- END ITEM TEMPLATE -->" will be repeated for each item you put in your blog. Things like $title and $date will be replaced with the correct values. Also modify style.css to change the appearance of your pages.
• If you would like to use jEdit to write your blog, copy the file blog_entry.bsh to the macros dir of your jEdit home directory (~/.jedit/macros).
• Open index.rss and modify it to include the title of your blog, and your first blog entries. (Alternatively, copy a pre-existing RSS file - e.g. from your old blog - and remove the link tags.)
• To create a new blog entry in jEdit, place the cursor on a blank line where you want it to go, and run the blog_entry macro. It will create the required tags and fill in today's date.
• Modify the line near the top of generate_html.py so that the blog_home variable points to the home directory of your blog.
• Run the generate_html.py file by typing python generate_html.py in a DOS/Cmd/terminal window, after cd-ing into the directory containing the file index.rss.
• Upload the files index.rss, index.html and style.css to your web space.
• Check out the file index.html in your browser, and index.rss in your favourite RSS reader.
• Whenever you add a blog entry to index.rss, re-run generate_html.py and it will insert <guid>s and <link>s into the RSS, and re-generate a new HTML page, which you can then re-upload.