lb/README.md

lb -- Luke's Blog Script

Blogs and RSS feeds in less than 100 lines of shell script. lb stands for whatever. Maybe "Luke's blog", maybe "lightweight blog", maybe "less bloat", doesn't matter that much.

Features

lb is an extremely small shell script that lets you write blog posts and will format them in all the ways you could ever want. Here's what it will produce:

• A Rolling Blog Page. See my own Rolling Page as an example.
• A list of all blog entries with dates: Blog List File. (Note that my earlier entries lack the date as they were added before I added this feature.)
• All your blog posts appear as standalone entries/pages, for example like this one.
• These standalone files exist in a blog/ directory, which you can allow to be browsed manually via your Apache web server as I have here.
• Blog posts are added, in full form, to an RSS feed of your chosing as well, see my RSS feed.
• Posts in the rolling blog have divs that can easily be modified via a CSS stylesheet, and in general everything is easily editable.
• One command to delete published entries from the RSS feed, rolling blog and standalone entries simultaneously.

Usage

./lb new	# Make a new blog post draft.
./lb finalize	# Finalize/publish a blog post draft.
./lb delete	# Delete a published blog post.
./lb discard	# Delete a draft of an entry.
./lb edit	# Edit a draft of an entry.

Use ./lb delete to remove finished posts, because this command removes the .html files and the entries from the RSSfeed and rolling blog. Don't be tempted to delete everything manually unless you know what you're doing.

Installation

• GNU sed is required.
• Your $EDITOR variable should be set to your preferred text editor.
• Be sure that you own or have writing privileges in the given directory, so the script can create the required directory structure.
• Download the lb script and put it in your website's main directory. The expectation is that your rolling blog file and RSS feed will be there as well.
• Open the script and change the first few variables to match the files you use in your website.
• Add markers for where the new blog posts are added. Don't skip this step. See below.

Markers

For the system to work, add the following comment line to a (1) Rolling Blog File (as above), a (2) Blog List File and (3) RSS feed.

<!-- LB -->

You can format these files/pages how ever you want, just be sure to edit the lb file and change the variables at the top to match the file names of those you chose.

When you finalize a blog post, it will be added directly below that line in the proper format (either HTML or the proper RSS/XML format), give you the rolling blog and RSS feed for free.

Other stuff

The other files in the repo are an illustration of how the bare bones of the blog can work. The HTML entries create divs with the id "entry", which allows you to modify them with a CSS stylesheet.

Browse my blog for an idea of how it works (links above).

To-Do

• Make a function for revising already published entries, updating in all output locations.