Port

I've had a lot of trouble finding a blogging platform which I enjoyed using - they were either too heavy or required using a web editor or were tricky to customize and theme. So last week I put together a super lightweight blogging platform called port.

port is the centralized complement to nomadic, which is a lightweight note management system. Like nomadic, port uses directory structure to define its routing structure and works primarily off markdown documents.

Here's what port offers:

• Posts are GitHub-flavored markdown files, with MathJax support
• A blog is represented as a directory, with subdirectories of markdown posts
• Post categories are defined by the folders they are in
• RSS feeds for individual categories and for all posts
• Very easy theming (Jinja2 templates)
• Managed via a CLI (the port command)
• No database necessary!
• No admin UI necessary!

There are a couple additional convenience features as well:

• port sync makes it easy to sync your local site files to a remote machine (e.g. your server)
• port host generates the config files necessary to host your blog with uwsgi, supervisor, and nginx
• port serve serves the site locally, which is useful for previewing your work

Tutorial

Here's how to get going with port. For this example I'll specify my site's directory as ~/spaceandtimes.

Install

pip install port

Create a site (I'll use my site as an example) and go through the config

port create spaceandtimes

Setup a category (just renaming the default category port creates)

mv ~/spaceandtimes/default_category ~/spaceandtimes/coding

Add an image to the assets folder

mv ~/some_image.png ~/spaceandtimes/assets/

Create a post (using vi here but use whatever editor you'd like)

vi ~/spaceandtimes/coding/my_first_post.md

---
published_at: 06.30.2015 10:53
---

Hello!

Here's an image:
![some alt text](/assets/some_image.png)

Build the site

port build spaceandtimes

Serve the site locally

port serve spaceandtimes

Check it out at localhost:5005!

To host the site on a server, follow these steps (this assumes an Ubuntu server):

Install the right stuff

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install uwsgi supervisor uwsgi-plugin-python uwsgi-plugin-python3 nginx

Install port on the server

pip install port

Create the site on the server (again, say we put the site at ~/spaceandtimes):

port create spaceandtimes

Then run the host command to automatically generate the necessary configs and restart the nginx and supervisor processes (the last argument is the user that the site was generated under):

port host spaceandtimes blog.spaceandtimes.com ftseng

From your local machine, sync your site (but first, build your site locally):

port sync spaceandtimes user@my_server.com:~/spaceandtimes

Workflow

My workflow with port is to write posts locally, build locally, and then sync to my server. It's super fast and easy :)

So basically:

vi ~/spaceandtimes/etc/my_new_post.md
port build spaceandtimes
port sync spaceandtimes ftseng@myserver.com:~/spaceandtimes

And that's it!

See the GitHub repo for more info on theming and other details.