About

This is what I use to run http://macaronicode.se.

Feel free to steal anything (especially fileblog.py) for yourself. There's no license.

Requirements

• Python 2.7
  • flask
  • markdown2
  • jsonpickle
  • pygments

Idea

I'm not a big fan of databases. When I wrote the very first version of this site, I used a database, but it seemed silly and overkill for something that doesn't actually need to store more than static text. Static text is what you have static text files for, right?

So, I made a blog platform using only static text files. Posts are written using Markdown, metadata is stored using Markdown2's metadata extension, and are thus fully human-readable and safe from database corruption/crashes.

Post Syntax

Fileblog puts only one constraint on your post syntax: the first non-blank line (after an eventual metadata block) must be a title (underlined with =====).

Also, since file modification timestamps are rather fragile things (a simple touch or move is enough to reset it) and only Mac OS X stores creation time, Fileblog needs to store the timestamp in the file. This is done with a line like ! 27 Apr 2013, 15:14 inserted at the start of a file upon first viewing it.
I recommend you to create a blank file, view it to get an autogenerated timestamp, then open and edit it. Before publishing, remember to delete the old timestamp and view it to get a new one. And not to overwrite the new one by saving over it.

I get HTTP 500:s everywhere in production!

Make sure the cache directory is writable by the web server. It'll probably default to be writable only by you.