I never understood why blogging platforms had to be so complex. In my opinion, the perfect blog software would adhere to a few important principals:
- Bells and whistles are a waste of time. They never get used.
- Less is better. You shouldn't have to waste time configuring.
- Built with Python. Customizing should be quick and easy.
With these three things in mind, I set out searching for my perfect blogging platform and found nothing that met my needs. Since I couldn't find what I wanted, I did what any good hacker would do: I built it.
The result is Logr, a simple, easy to use blog that operates on Markdown files To post a new article, simply type it into any text editor and save it to the /articles directory and you're done. It will appear as soon as you reload the page.
Add optional pages. These could contain information about yourself, how one would go about getting in contact with you, projects you're working on, or anything else!
Check out this site for a preview of the blog!
- Write a setup file. python setup.py install is all you need to type before you're up and running.
- Optional pages that could contain information about you, how to contact you, projects you're working on, or anything else.
- Logr needs some design work.
- Performance is not good. Need to index instead of calling listdir so much.
- Add support for remote hosting of article files via Dropbox
Logr was designed to be simple, and that's exactly what it is.
To update the front page front.md in the pages directory and edit it to your liking.
To create a new category, create a subdirectory inside the articles directory. The name of the directory will be the name of the category.
Open any text editor and write the article using the Markdown markup language. When you're done, save it to the appropriate directory.
If you wanted an article named An Introduction to Software Engineering to appear in the Software category, the location of the file would look like this:
- /articles/Software/intro_to_software_engineering.md
- Anything in the articles directory will show up in the Miscellaneous category.
- The title of the article should be the first line of the file. This is what the link of the front page and the slug for the article are generated from. Choose wisely.
- All files should be saved as .md. Any files that do not end in .md will not show up on the website.
- All files are translated directly from Markdown to HTML. Keep this in mind when editing. If you have any questions about the Markdown syntax, they should be answered here.
If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. My email is available through my GitHub profile.