By the way, I recently uploaded the code to github: https://github.com/carlesfe/bashblog and some people are using it to publish their blogs via dropbox and site44, cool!
2. I referenced this in a sub-comment: what are the options of parsing Markdown using a bash-only blogging utility?
For me, after many years of making web pages, HTML is easier than Markdown.
And why did we stop using plain HTML files for simple blogs (that are self-hosted)? Do I really need a "CMS" and/or framework to spew some formatted content if I'm not even gonna have comments? I've seen blogs that use some custom Ruby app or PHP and they're just a combination of an archive index and posts.
This kinda defeats the "simple" bit doesn't it? ;)
I have nothing against these and if that floats your boat, then by all means, use it. But just the idea of not having to install anything (in fact, nothing) extra and just having this all work with a single file is very appealing to me.
Example use: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/ (9 years)
Incidentally, the creator of nb announced that he is postponing the development of nb indefinitely last month.
OP: Do you think you might want to take up that development?
I got a copy by request back in 2008 -- good stuff.
I think the only thing that I might have done differently would have been to allow myself to use Perl since it is a dependency of git anyway.
If you or anyone feels like writing a fugitive clone in Perl, I can assure you a few users as soon as its working!
The "CMS" I wrote was about 75 lines of sh, and had slightly fewer features than the one linked here. That's the beauty of writing your own: you decide what to include, and no more. cp wc sort awk etc. is all you need. If you want it to look beautiful, that's where design and CSS come into play, both of which are outside the scope of content management.
Details here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/web/feed.html
Ask HN: Open source commenting systems for static pages - alternatives to Juvia?
I guess I was thinking of "simple" in terms of the static HTML and deploy. I don't think you actually have to run any Ruby commands, you just run a command line task and it reads the textfiles from the specified directory.
Unless I missed it in the OP's description, one huge advantage that Jekyll has over the OP's bash solution is the ability to write in Markdown, made possible by the inclusion of Markdown parsing Ruby libraries. So the complexity added in the framework part, IMO, is more than made up in the simplicity of actual content-production.
for i in ./*.md; do perl Markdown.pl --html4tags $i > pub/${i%.*}.txt; done;
Now if you consider "maintenance" or "separation of concerns" or any of the other things anyone using a framework takes for granted, this is inadequate, but that's not what I see this as. I could, of course, use grep and sed to do maintenance if I felt as much.
I think maybe both you and cmelbye in his reply are not considering is that this is just a step above manually editing and creating HTML files. The appeal isn't just simplicity, but a bit of nostalgia as well.
I guess it's a bit hard to explain, but the idea here is not having more layers than absolutely necessary between my thoughts and having it accessible to the web. I hope that made sense.