Shinmun - a file based blog engine
Shinmun is a small file based blog engine. Write posts in your favorite
editor, track them with git and deploy to Heroku. Small, fast and simple.
Features
- Posts are text files formatted with Markdown, Textile or HTML
- Deploy via git-push
- Easy and fast deploying on Heroku
- Index, category and archive listings
- RSS feeds
- Syntax highlighting provided by CodeRay
Quickstart
Install the gems:
$ gem install shinmun
Create a sample blog:
$ shinmun init myblog
This will create a directory with all necessary files. Now start the
web server:
$ cd myblog
$ rackup
Browse to the following url:
http://localhost:9292
Voilà, your first blog is up and running!
Writing Posts
Posts can be created by using the shinmun
command inside your blog
folder:
shinmun post 'The title of the post'
Shinmun will then create a post file in the right place, for example
in posts/2008/9/the-title-of-the-post.md
.
Post Format
Each blog post is just a text file with a YAML header and a body. The
YAML header is surrounded with 2 lines of 3 dashes.
The YAML header has following attributes:
title
: mandatorydate
: posts need one, pages notcategory
: a post belongs to one categorytags
: a comma separated list of tags
Example post:
---
date: 2008-09-05
category: Ruby
tags: bluecloth, markdown
title: BlueCloth, a Markdown library
---
This is the summary, which is by definition the first paragraph of the
article. The summary shows up in category listings or the index listing.
Syntax highlighting
Thanks to the fantastic highlighting library CodeRay, highlighted
code blocks can be embedded easily in Markdown. For Textile support
you have to require coderay/for_redcloth
. These languages are
supported: C, Diff, Javascript, Scheme, CSS, HTML, XML, Java, JSON,
RHTML, YAML, Delphi
To activate CodeRay for a code block, you have to declare the language
in lower case:
@@ruby
def method_missing(id, *args, &block)
puts "#{id} was called with #{args.inspect}"
end
Note that the declaration MUST be followed by a blank line!
Directory layout
+ config.ru
+ pages
+ about.md
+ posts
+ 2007
+ 2008
+ 9
+ my-article.md
+ public
+ styles.css
+ templates
+ 404.rhtml
+ archive.rhtml
+ category.rhtml
+ index.rhtml
+ index.rxml
+ layout.rhtml
+ page.rhtml
+ post.rhtml
Blog configuation
In config.ru
you can set the properties of your blog:
blog.config = {
:language => 'en',
:title => "Blog Title",
:author => "The Author",
:categories => ["Ruby", "Javascript"],
:description => "Blog description"
}
Templates
Layout and templates are rendered by ERB. The layout is defined in
templates/layout.rhtml
. The content will be provided in the variable
@content
. A minimal example:
<html>
<head>
<title><%= @blog.title %></title>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'style' %>
</head>
<body>
<%= @content %>
</body>
</html>
The attributes of a post are accessible via the @post variable:
<div class="article">
<h1><%= @post.title %></h1>
<div class="date">
<%= human_date @post.date %>
</div>
<%= @post.body_html %>
...
</div>
Deployment on Heroku
Install the Heroku gem:
$ gem install heroku
Installing your public key:
$ heroku keys:add
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: joe@example.com
Password:
Uploading ssh public key /Users/joe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Create an app on Heroku.
$ heroku create myblog
Created http://myblog.heroku.com/ | git@heroku.com:mybblog.git
Git remote heroku added
Now on your local machine, you create a new remote repository and push
your blog to Heroku:
$ cd ~/myblog
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'initial commit'
$ git push heroku
That's it. Your blog is deployed.
GitHub Project
Download or fork the package at my github repository