Introducing tinyblog 26 Nov 2011

I wanted to start blogging a whole time ago. The only thing holding me back was the lack of a simple and small blog engine.

I didn’t want to have a full blown web application with all the overhead (database backend, admin interface, wysiwyg editors, security issues, …).

The only tool getting rid of all the bloat is jekyll, a static blog generator.

Well, jekyll is nice, but it remembers me a bit of scaffolding and the size of the project is bigger than i expected it.

So i tried to create my own blog engine.

The requirements are

• no server side code
• a simple approach which can be extended
• a transparent approach of adding new content

So let me introduce tinyblog

tinyblog is written only as client-side code that fetches all data from the server. tiny means the current code base are under 200 lines of code.

All blog posts are put into the directory

content\<year>\<month>\<day>\<title>.md

As the client side javascript is not aware of the blog posts the user has to create a index file called content.json

This index file can be updated with the hook.sh script, which just runs some shell magic.

Using the blog

It is pretty easy to use the blog on your own site. You just have to create the content directory and the content.json index and reference the javascript files in your header and create a

<div id="blog"></div>

somewhere on your page

Constribute

You can visit the project at github.com/mren/tinyblog.