first-post

This is the first blog post on my blog. I thought it'd make sense to post about the blog itself, since I had to write the blog software before writing the blog posts. So here we are.

The Blog

I've always thought it would be fun to have a blog that just renders markdown out of a directory as the "posts". I know I didn't have to go this far. But... It's simple. It's lightweight. No database servers. No authentication. It'll run on a $20/year VPS in the cloud. I control the entire technology stack from hardware to website content. Can't say that for tumblr or bloggr or whatever.

With this blog software, making a post is as easy as:

1. ssh into host machine
2. run sudo nano ~/posts/<post-name>.md
3. write the post (in markdown format)
4. press ctrl+o (multiple times just to be sure)
5. the post is automatically available at myfavoritecoloris.black/post/<post-name>.

The post content is decoupled from the visual style of the post. If I change the blog stylesheets, all of the posts automatically use the new style.

It's easy enough to link between posts. Here's the test post that I wrote while writing the CSS for the blog.

On the should-change-list:

• add syntax highlighting for code blocks
• sort posts by date
• posts are read from disk and rendered every time they are accessed (pray for good disk latency)

Software

This is built on node.js, and uses at least the following packages:

• express handles HTTP requests and routing.
• ejs handles page templating.
• dotenv is for configuration.
• markdown-it renders markdown as HTML.

The source code is available on my github.

Hosting

The blog software is running on a debian linux box in the cloud. I already had this domain name available and wasn't using it, so I figured I'd put it to use.

The instance of the blog software you're looking at is behind an nginx proxy. nginx provides the SSL you're getting. The node app could be configured to provide SSL, but I didn't feel like implementing that in code when it's easier to add the app to an existing list of "upstream apps to provide ssl for".

d-i-y

You can set up an instance of md-blog on your machine pretty easily. Requires nodejs and git. I've assumed the reader uses linux.

1. Clone git repo with git clone https://github.com/brosilio/md-blog
2. cd to md-blog
3. run cp example.env .env
4. edit .env file (perhaps with nano .env)
5. make sure you have some markdown files in your POST_DIRECTORY directory
6. run npm start
7. navigate to http://localhost:3000 (or whatever you set in .env; if not default)