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novoid / lazyblorg

Blogging with Org-mode for very lazy people
GNU General Public License v3.0
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blog blog-engine blogging emacs lazy minimalistic orgdown orgmode python simple simplicity simplistic

readme

-- coding: utf-8;mode: org; --

This file is best viewed with GNU Emacs Org-mode: http://orgmode.org/

+BEGIN_QUOTE

«A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.» ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%25C3%25A9ry][Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]])

+END_QUOTE

This is a web log (blog) environment for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs][GNU Emacs]] with [[http://orgmode.org/][Org-mode]] which generates static HTML5 web pages. It is much more superior to any other Org-mode-to-blog-solution I have seen so far!

: <(All?) your Org-mode files> --lazyblorg--> static HTML pages : : v : optional upload (shell) script

: v : your web space

There is [[http://orgmode.org/worg/org-blog-wiki.html][a list of similar/alternative Org-mode blogging projects]] whose workflows seem really tedious to me.

See [[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/49747/][my original post to the Org-mode ML]] for how this idea of lazyblorg started in 2011.

This awesome piece of software is a sheer beauty with regard to:

** DISCLAIMER: This is a personal project

I wrote lazyblorg to get a blogging system that works for me exactly the way I need it. I did not write lazyblorg for the pleasure on the coding process - I just wanted to get the resulting thing working in order to be able to blog the way I want to blog.

Therefore, it's mostly a works-for-me project. I won't add anything that I don't use myself.

For the same reason, I won't accept pull requests for things like:

If you do want to adapt lazyblorg and implement your own features that conflict with the things listed above, I'd like to see you creating a fork of this project. If you drop me a line with a description how your fork differs from the original, I'm glad to add it to this README file.

If you think that your idea might be also a good one for me, you can always hand in a pull request and I'll have a look if I'm willing to add it. However, don't be disappointed if I don't. I want to keep the time spent on lazyblorg at a minimum. My personal priority is visible in [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues][the lazyblorg issues]] where I introduced tags for [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Apriohigh][high]] and [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Apriolow][low priority]] things to implement.

** Target group

Lazy users of [[http://orgmode.org/][Org-mode]] who want to do blogging very easily and totally cool.

Or simply wannabes. I'm perfectly fine with this as long as they use lazyblorg.

** Other people using lazyblorg

Pages using lazyblorg are listed [[https://karl-voit.at/tags/lazyblorg/][on my personal tag page on "lazyblorg"]]. Please do drop me a line when you want to get your page added to the list.

Quote from [[https://seppjansen.com/2018/04/24/site-using-lazyblorg/][Sepp Jansen]]:

+BEGIN_QUOTE

[...]

But when I revisited lazyblorg after studying the other packages, it suddenly seemed like a better solution. After only a short time of reading I figured out the entire templating and post generation system. Although not the most elegant, it is super simple and easy to understand. And those are my most important points.

The developer states that it is easy to configure and start building, and is absolutely right.

In just a few hours I went from installing dependencies to having a fully working website, including some layout and CSS customization. The included HTML and CSS is easy to modify so I could (lazily) make the site look like I wanted it to without too much digging in many little files. I even managed to make it look a lot like my old site without too much effort! Lazyblorg really lives up to its name!

[...]

I really like lazyblorg, and I'll happily manage [[https://seppjansen.com/][this website]] with it for as long as possible.

+END_QUOTE

** Skills necessary

** System requirements :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2014-03-14 Fr 13:24] :END:

lazyblorg is written in Python 3.

Development platform is Debian GNU/Linux. So with any decent GNU/Linux you should be fine.

It might work on OS X but I never tried it so far.

I definitely does not work with Microsoft Windows. Although a programmer can add a couple of ~os.path.thisorthat()~ here and there and it should be good to go. Please consider sending a pull-request if you are fixing this issue. Thanks!

** Version and Changelog :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2014-03-14 Fr 13:28] :END:

Currently (2019-10-23), I consider lazyblorg in beta-status with version 0.96 or so.

I don't maintain a specific changelog. However, when there are substantial changes to lazyblorg, you will find [[https://karl-voit.at/tags/lazyblorg/][a blog article tagged with "lazyblorg"]]. Use an RSS/Atom aggregator to follow the blog.

** Why lazyblorg?

Minimum effort for blogging.

And: your blog entries can be written anywhere in your Org-mode files. They will be found by lazyblorg. :-)

Further advantages are listed below.

** Example workflow for creating a blog entry

  1. write a blog entry anywhere in your Org-mode files
    • With lazyblorg, you can, e.g., write a blog article about an event as a sub-heading of the event itself!
  2. tag your entry with ~:blog:~
  3. add an unique ID in the PROPERTIES drawer
  4. set the state of your entry to ~DONE~
    • make sure that a ~:LOGBOOK:~ drawer entry will be created that contains the time-stamp

An example blog entry looks like this:

: ** DONE An Example Blog Post :blog:lazyblorg:software: : CLOSED: [2017-06-18 Sun 00:16] : :PROPERTIES: : :ID: 2017-07-17-example-posting : :CREATED: [2017-06-17 Sat 23:45] : :END: : :LOGBOOK: : - State "DONE" from "NEXT" [2017-06-18 Sun 00:16] : :END: : […] : Today, I found out that…

That's it. lazyblorg does the rest. It feels like magic, doesn't it? :-)

** Advantages

These things make a blogger a happy one:

No other Org-mode blogging system I know of is able to process blog entries which are scattered across all your Org-mode documents except the usual org-export-based approaches.

No other Org-mode blogging system I know of is able to generate a blog entry with that minimum effort to the author.

You do not need to maintain a specific Org-mode file that contains you blog posts only. [[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/03/07/BNotes][*Create blog posts]] anywhere* in between your notes, todos, contacts, ...

And there are some technological advantages you might consider as well:

** Disadvantages

Yes, there are some disadvantages. I am totally honest with you since we are becoming close friends right now:

** Features

+BEGIN_QUOTE

«Technology develops from the primitive via the complex to the simple.»

+END_QUOTE

([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%25C3%25A9ry][Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]]; note: lazyblorg is currently "primitive" but with a great outlook up to the status of being simple)

Here is a selection of features of lazyblorg which helps you to blog efficiently:

** FAQs

See https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/wiki/FAQs

I am using it for [[http://Karl-Voit.at][my own blog]] and therefore it gets more and more ready to use as I add new features.

What's working so far:

** External dependencies

The number of external dependencies is kept at a minimum.

This is a list of the most important dependencies:

All other libraries should be part of a standard Python distribution.

If you don't want to install the dependencies via package management, you can use the python way from =requirements.txt=: : pip install -r requirements.txt

Running tests also requires pytest.

** How to Start

  1. Get the source

  2. Adapt ~config.py~ to meet your settings.

  3. Do a technological test-drive

    • start: ~lazyblorg/example_invocation.sh~
    • this should work with GNU/Linux (and most probably OS X)
    • if not, there is something wrong with the set-up; maybe missing external libraries, wrong paths, ...

  4. Study, understand, and adopt the content of [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/blob/master/example_invocation.sh][example_invocation.sh]]

    • with this, you are able to modify command line parameters to meet your requirements
    • if unsure, ask for help using ~lazyblorg.py --help~

  5. Get yourself an overview on what defines a lazyblorg blog post and write your own blog posts. A (normal temporal) blog article consists of:

    1. A (direct) tag has to be ~blog~
      • Sorry, no tag inheritance. Every blog entry has to be explicitly tagged.
    2. You have to add an unique ~:ID:~ property
    3. The entry has to be marked with ~DONE~
    4. A ~:LOGBOOK:~ entry has to be found with the time-stamp of setting the entry to ~DONE~
    5. Get yourself familiar on the sub-set of Org-mode syntax you can use with lazyblorg
      • Always put an empty line between different syntax elements such as a heading and the next paragraph, normal text and a list or a table, and so forth.
      • You should not get a disaster if you are using elements lazyblorg is not optimized for. The result might disappoint you, that's all.
      • However, "unknown" Org-mode elements are automatically converted through pandoc as a fall-back.

  6. OPTIONAL: Write your own CSS file

  7. OPTIONAL: Adopt the blog template

  8. OPTIONAL: Create tag pages for your most important tags where you describe how you are using this tag, what are the most important blog entries related to the tag and so forth.

  9. Publish your pages on a web space of your choice

    • publishing can be done in various ways. This is how I do it using ~lazyblorg/make_and_publish_public_voit.sh~ which is an adopted version of ~lazyblorg/example_invocation.sh~:
      1. invoking ~start_all_tests.sh~
        • this is for checking whether or not recent code changes did something harmful to my (unfortunately very limited) set of unit tests
      2. invoking ~lazyblorg~ with my more or less fixed set of command line parameters
      3. invoking ~rsync -av testdata/2del/blog/* $HOME/public_html/~
        • it synchronizes the newly generated blog data to the local copy of my web space data
        • this separation makes sense to me because with this, I am able to do test drives without overwriting my (local copy of my) blog
      4. invoking [[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/][unison]]
        • in order to transfer my local copy of my web space data to my public web space
    • This method has the advantage that generating (invoking ~lazyblorg~) and publishing (invoking ~unison~) are separate steps. This way, I can locally re-generate the blog (for testing purposes) as often I want to. However, as long as I do not sync it to my web space, I keep the meta-data (which is in the local web space copy) of the published version (and not the meta-data of the previous test-run).

  10. Have fun with a pretty neat method to generate your blog pages

Because we are already close friends now, I tell you a hidden feature of lazyblorg nobody knows yet: whenever you see a π-symbol in the upper right corner of a blog entry on [[http://qr.cx/7wKz][my blog]]: this is a link to the original Org-mode source of that page. This way, you can compare Org-mode-source and HTML-result right away. Isn't that cool? :-)

** Five categories of page type

There are five different types of pages in lazyblorg. Most of the time, you are going to produce temporal pages. However, it is important to understand the other ones as well.

In order to process a blog-heading to its HTML5 representation, its Org-mode file has to be included in the ~--orgfiles~ command line argument of ~lazyblorg.py~. Do not forget to include the archive files as well.

  1. temporal
  2. persistent
  3. tags
  4. entry page
  5. templates

Please do read https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/wiki/Page-Types for important details.

** BONUS: Preview Blog Article :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2014-02-25 Tue 17:27] :END:

It is tedious to re-generate the whole blog and even upload it to your web-space just to check the HTML version of the article you are currently writing.

Yeah, this also sucks at my side.

Good news everybody: There is a simple method to preview the article under the cursor. The script [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/blob/master/preview_blogentry.sh][preview_blogentry.sh]] contains an ELISP function that extracts the current blog article (all lazyblorg criteria has to be fulfilled: ID, ~blog~ tag, status ~DONE~), stores it into a temporary file, and invokes lazyblorg via ~preview_blogentry.sh~ with this temporary file and the Org-mode file containing the format definitions.

If this worked out, your browser shows you all generated blog articles.

Please do adopt the mentioned scripts to you specific requirements - the ones from the repository are for my personal set-up which is unlikely to fit yours (directory paths mostly).

Bang! Another damn cool feature of lazyblorg. This is going better and better. :-)

** BONUS: Jump From URL to Blog Article

Imagine, you're looking at a blog article of your nice lazyblorg-generated blog. Now you want to go to the corresponding Org-mode source to fix a typo.

The issue here is, that you have to either know, where your heading is located or you have to go to the HTML page source, extract the ID, and jump to this ID.

I've got a better method: put the URL of your blog article into your clipboard (via ~C-l C-c~), press a magic shortcut in Emacs, and BAAAM! you're right on spot.

How's that magic happening?

Just use the following Emacs lisp code snippet, adapt the ~domain~ string, and assign a keyboard shortcut:

+begin_src elisp

(defun my-jump-to-lazyblorg-heading-according-to-URL-in-clipboard () "Retrieves an URL from the clipboard, gets its Org-mode source, extracts the ID of the article and jumps to its Org-mode heading" (interactive) (let ( ;; Getting URL from the clipboard. Since it may contain ;; some text properties we are using substring-no-properties ;; function (url (substring-no-properties (current-kill 0))) ;; This is a check string: if the URL in the clipboard ;; doesn't start with this, an error message is shown (domain "http://karl-voit.at") ) ;; Check if URL string is from my domain (all other strings do ;; not make any sense here) (if (string-prefix-p (upcase domain) (upcase url)) ;; Retrieving content by URL into new buffer asynchronously (url-retrieve url ;; call this lambda function when URL content is retrieved (lambda (status) ;; Extrating and preparing the ID (let* ( ;; Limit the ID search to the top 1000 characters of the buffer (pageheader (buffer-substring 1 1000)) ;; Start index of the id (start (string-match "<meta name=\"orgmode-id\" content=\"" pageheader)) ;; End index of the id (end (string-match "\" />" pageheader start)) ;; Amount of characters to skip for the openning tag (chars-to-skip (length "<meta name=\"orgmode-id\" content=\"")) ;; Extract ID (lazyblorg-id (if (and start end (< start end)) ;; ... extract it and return. (substring pageheader (+ start chars-to-skip) end) nil)) ) (message (concat "Looking for id:" lazyblorg-id " ...")) (org-open-link-from-string (concat "id:" lazyblorg-id)) ) ) ) (message (concat "Sorry: the URL \"" (substring url 0 (length domain)) "...\" doesn't start with \"" domain "\". Aborting.")) ) ) )

+end_src

** BONUS: Embedding External Things

** Using relative URLs instead of domain-URLs :PROPERTIES: :CREATED: [2022-09-19 Mon 10:01] :END:

The links to the CSS & co, even on the homepage, start with a slash which means you can't easily have a look at the HTML locally by opening the files, you need to spin up a webserver.

If you want to learn how to move to a more flexible setup, read [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues/78#issuecomment-1250392523][this comment and follow its instructions]].

I'm glad you like my tools. If you want to support me:

If you want to contribute to this cool project, please fork and contribute!

Issues, bugs,… are maintained in the [[https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg/issues][GitHub issue tracker]].

I am using [[http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/][Python PEP8]] and some ideas from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development][Test Driven Development (TDD)]].

[[http://karl-voit.at/temp/github/2017-06-04_lazyblorg_README.png]]

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