This project is the engine that drives my blog at calebbrown.id.au.

This blog is powered by a static JSON database stored on disk rather than using a more traditional relational database. The JSON database is populated from Markdown, HTML or text formated source files.

The website is built using the Python micro web framework, Bottle with memcached being used to reduce disk access.

The frontend layout is built using Bootstrap.

Warning: this project is currently designed to only run my blog so your milage may vary

Using git:

$ git clone git://github.com/calebbrown/calebcc.git

Or download the zip file

Inside a virutal environment run:

$ cd calebcc
$ pip -r requirements.txt

Create the source directory structure.

$ mkdir -p source_data/pages
$ mkdir -p source_data/blog
$ mkdir -p source_data/media
$ mkdir -p source_data/legacy

In source_data/pages create a page named about.md with the following content:

Title: About

# This is the about page

In source_data/blog create a page named hello.md with the following content:

Title: Gabriel Marshall Brown
Date: Tue, 07 May 2013 20:44:00 +1100
Author: Joe Blogs
Channel: life

Hello, World!

Open up env/dev.py in an editor and add the following lines:

DATA_SOURCE = '/path/to/calebcc/source_data'
DATA_STORE = '/path/to/calebcc/compiled_data'

We have some data and have updated the config so we can build the database:

$ python calebcc.py --parse
Parsing docs...
$

Now we're ready to go - time to run the server:

$ python calebcc.py
Bottle server starting up (using WSGIRefServer())...
Listening on http://localhost:8080/
Hit Ctrl-C to quit.

To view the website visit localhost:8080 in a browser!

The blog engine parses documents based on text files with email message formated headers and a body of Markdown, HTML or raw text.

For example in first.md we might have:

Title: First Post!
Author: Joe Blogs
Date: Tue, 07 May 2013 20:44:00 +1100

# First Post

This is the first post

In this example we have a markdown formatted post with the title "First Post!", written by "Joe Blogs". The filename is used to define the url of the post and the format of the text.

It is also possible to specify the format using the Format header. Apart from markdown, html and text are supported.

A blank line is required between the last header and the first line of the body.

The header Alt-Slug can be added to indicate an alternative location for the document to be accessed under. This is particularly useful in the case where a blog post has been renamed.

When a user visits the alternative location they are redirected to the real location.

Multiple Alt-Slug headers can be added for multiple redirects.