Blogging in reSt on GitHub
I started hosting my blog on GitHub. Why?
There are some requirements that I found hard to meet using a standard blogging engine:
I want to locally edit my blog, using a text editor. (And, by the way, all online blog-editors stink.)
I want to store my blog “source files” in plain(ish) text, with only little markup:
- I can put plain text under source control. (This also gives me an easy backup facility.)
- I like writing in plain text - very little distractions.
- I can easily transform it to multiple output formats.
I’d prefer restructured text (reSt), because I’m familiar with it.
I would like to keep record of my published posts. Which posts were online at what moment in time?
I would like to have some freedom in styling the site. (Even though I’m not very good at it.)
Since I’m already familiar with Sphinx, I decided to write my blog in reSt, run it through Sphinx to produce a static html site and then push the output to my user page on GitHub.
You are looking at the result.
Because the personal page is backed by a git repo, I have full history of my published posts. The source files are stored in reSt and are put under source control [1]. This is a private repository - I have to put my drafts somewhere, right.
There are some thing I’d like to add to this blog:
- An automatically created atom feed.
- Apply categories or labels to blog posts.
- Enable readers to leave comments.
Only the atom feed is a priority to me. I’ll investigate if there’s a Sphinx extension for that.
Footnotes
| [1] | In fact I use use a Mercurial repo for the source files, in combination with a private online repository at Bibucket. Mercurial is a nice DVCS too! And I like Bitbucket almost as much as I do GitHub. |