Quick Challenge #

The main goal of this project is to show how easily you can develop a flat file blog with markdown as the primary writing language. It’s not perfect, it will never be, some people are already doing great things based on that idea, like Hugo for instance. Let’s note though, that’s not a static website generator.

Behavior #

As stated earlier, SmallBlog isn’t a static website generator. It’s a dynamic web server, meaning that when you start it, it will parse the content of the pages directory. While the server is running you can add new files to this directory, they will be automatically parsed and added to the site. Same goes if you modify the content of an already parsed file, it will be parsed once more. You can even change the metadata of the file, the server will keep its consistency.

Design #

I already made a markdown based blog engine : MarkDownBlog. I’m tired of its design, it was my first real project, and I made a lot of bad technology choices. Like, why would I syntax-highlight on the server-side when there are perfectly good JS libs that do that automatically on the client-side ? That’s one less problem to deal with.

That’s why I’m using prismjs to do that. Plus it integrates perfectly with Blackfriday, the markdown parser I’m using. Blackfriday provides a parser for Github formated markdown. Which means you can use the notations of Github to write your articles, include the triple-backticks notation to write some code.

I also decided not to use any CSS framework this time. Keeping things simple and sober. And because I suck at designing things, I’d like to thank bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com for the inspiration.

How it works #

When starting, the server will scan for the pages directory. For each file present in that directory it will parse the headers that are written in the yaml format, as well as the markdown under the header (which are separated by a blank line). A map containing the slug of the posts will be created as well as a slice of articles sorted by date. The map will be used for a low complexity access to the articles by their slugs, which will result in fast performances, something like 150µs to display a post.

This method has its flaws. The more posts you have, the more RAM the server will consume.

While the server is running, it will also monitor the pages dir for new files, modification of exisiting files, or removal. This way, the server doesn’t need to be restarted when you want to publish or remove one of your posts. If you detect that something went wrong, the state of your filesystem doesn’t match your blog for example, then restart the server. I make mistakes sometimes. And make sure to open an issue on Github so this can be fixed.

Everything is grey #

Just to be sure to please everyone, everything is grey. Customize the CSS to match your color preferences.

Rendering examples #

func main() {
    log.Println("Hello World !")
}

You can go build to build this, and here’s a list for your pretty eyes :

• With a first item there. With maybe some italic stuff ?
• And a second one. This time with bold content.
• And a third one with inlined content !
• Not putting a fourth one to show striked-through text.
• http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Here is how a quote looks like. I hope you like it because I didn’t put much work on styling that.
– Benjamin Franklin