weblog 0.5

Weblog is a blog publisher. It takes structured text files as input and outputs static HTML and RSS files. Weblog aims to be simple and robust.

Author:

Henry Precheur <[e-mail]>

Reviewers:

Anis Kadri, Bastien Simondi, Eric Salama

Abstract

Weblog is a web log or blog publisher. It takes structured text files as input and outputs static HTML / RSS files. Weblog aims to be simple and robust.

In the following document Weblog is the name of the software. The web log concept is referred as the more common term blog.

According to Wikipedia:

A blog (a portmanteau of web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.

Pre-requirements

• Python version 2.4+

• Jinja version 1.1+.

You can learn how to install Jinja at http://jinja.pocoo.org/documentation/installation.

Installation

Download Weblog’s latest version at http://henry.precheur.org/weblog/.

Extract it:

tar zxf weblog.tar.gz

It can be used right away.

You can also install it using the supplied setup.py script. Run python setup.py --help to learn how to use it.

Quick Start

In the following examples weblog/ represents Weblog’s installation directory.

Create a new directory named my_blog. The $ sign represents the shell prompt, do not type it!:

$ mkdir my_blog

Copy from the Weblog installation directory the file weblog.ini into my_blog:

$ cp weblog/examples/weblog.ini my_blog

weblog.ini is the configuration file of the blog. Check the configuration file section for more information. Do not worry about it now, no modification is required to get the following examples working.

Create a file named first_post.html in the my_blog directory:

title: First post
author: Me
date: 2007-08-25

Hello world!

Actually all the post filenames must end with .html.

Go in the my_blog directory and run the weblog_publish.py script:

$ cd my_blog/
$ python weblog/weblog_publish.py

Or if weblog_publish.py is in your PATH:

$ weblog_publish.py

It should create a directory named output which contains the generated files. You can look at the results by opening the file output/index.html in your browser.

The first 3 lines of the file first_post.html define the post’s parameters. These are standard RFC 2822 headers (the headers used in Emails). Only title and date are mandatory. author is optional. If you don’t fill this field, the author will be the one specified in weblog.ini.

The line Hello world! is the actual content of the post. Note that a blank line is required between the headers and the content.

The content is an HTML block. Use the HTML syntax to format your post content. For example create a second file named second_post.html:

title: Second post
author: Me (again!)
date: 2007-08-26

<em>Second</em> <q>test</q> <strong>post</strong>!
<p>
&copy 2007 Me
</p>

Regenerate the blog files:

$ python weblog/weblog_publish.py

Or:

$ weblog_publish.py

Reload the page in your browser. You should see a second post with some formating.

The default post file encoding is ASCII. If you want to use a different encoding you can specify it via the field encoding:

title: Encoding test
date: 2007-11-5
encoding: latin-1

Here you can put some ISO-8856-1 text ...

If you always use the same encoding. You can specify the default encoding in weblog.ini.

Encoding and escaping

Weblog tries to make sure its output is always correct. Non-ASCII characters, are converted to HTML entities so you don’t have to worry about it. The output will never be encoded into ISO-8856-1, UTF-8 or another non-ASCII encoding. Encoding conversions are not so simple in practice. By doing only one conversion to the simplest encoding possible, a lot of problems are solved.

The content of the post is not escaped. The title and the date of the post are escaped. A title like this: Hello <em>World</em> will be escaped. HTML tags will appear, and no formating will be applied to world. The original text “Hello <em>World</em>” will appear instead of “Hello World”,

You can override this by specifying raw as the encoding. Using the raw encoding nothing will be escaped or converted, but you must make sure all characters are ASCII characters:

title: Non-escaped <em>title</em>
author: <q>Me</q> &lt;me@my_weblog.org&gt;
encoding: raw

When the raw encoding is used. No checking is performed to make sure there are only ASCII characters in the text. This might change in the future.

Command line parameters

Usage: weblog_publish.py [options]

Options:

-h, --help

show this help message and exit

-s DIR, --source-dir=DIR

The source directory where the blog posts and thefile weblog.ini are located

-o DIR, --output-dir=DIR

The directory where all the generated files willbe written. If it does not exist it will be created.

Configuration file

All configuration options are in the weblog section. Learn more about the format of the configuration file: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-ConfigParser.html.

A configuration file looks like this:

[weblog]
title: Blog's title
url: http://example.com/
description: A sample blog.
source_dir: path/to/my/posts
output_dir: path/to/output/directory
encoding: latin-1
author: Me <[e-mail]>

Fields description

title

The blog’s title. It appears at the top of the blog’s homepage and in the page’s title

This field is mandatory.

url

The base URL of your blog. For example http://my-host.com/my-weblog/. It is used to generate the absolute URL’s to your blog.

This field is mandatory.

description

A short description of your blog. Like “My favorite books reviews”, or “Dr. Spock, publications about electronics”. Note that it is possible to use multiple lines like this:

description: My blog
  about
    configuration files.

the description will be merged to a single line like this My blog about configuration files..

This field is mandatory.

source_dir

The directory containing the file weblog.ini, the post files and possibly the templates directory. By default the current directory.

output_dir

The output directory. Generated files will be put there. By default output.

encoding

The default post file encoding. Default ASCII. It is overridden by the encoding field in the post file.

author

The default author. It is overridden by the author field in the post file.

post_per_page

The number of post displayed per listing page. Default is 10.

rss_post_limit

The maximum number of post to be included in the RSS file. The most recent posts are the ones included. Default is 10.

html_head

Additional information for the <head> section. Useful to add custom CSS style sheets. Can be a string or a filename. If a file with this name exists in the source directory then it is read. Else it is considered as a string. The result is processed using Jinja. You can use the variable top_dir to link to external files. It contains the path to the top directory of the blog.

Examples:

html_head=<style type='text/css'>body { font-family: sans-serif; }</style>

html_head={{ top_dir }}my_stylesheet.css

html_header

Additional content located just before the blog content. Can be a string or a filename. (See html_head above) Useful to add a logo or a search box at the top.

html_footer

Additional content located just after the blog content. Can be a string or a filename. (See html_head above) Useful to add … a footer!