Fixing Bloggen to start re-posting

Here’s a little back-story to how I used to write my posts. When I first started this blog, I used static HTML pages, migrated to WordPress, then to Chyrp, then to Pelican and Jekyll, and finally I wrote my own statically-generated posting software called Bloggen.

Bloggen started out with a number of shell scripts that turned a post in the format of

This is a title
2014-12-06 09:30
Category
Any, Applicable, Tags

And finally post content goes here...

into a static site. However, after developing it further, I noticed that none of that meta-info in the header of each file needed to be there! Instead, we can take all that info directly from the filesystem, which makes it even easier for any users to post.

First of all, we can assign the title of the post to the filename…just like this post.

Then, the date and time can be taken from that file’s creation and/or recent modification date. In OS X and Linux, this works perfectly.

After accumulating a lot of posts, it’s obvious that for simple, personal blogs, Categories and Tags are completely superfluous! So I axed them.

The final step, once we have a directory of our posts

is to run Bloggen. Et, voila! A blog! In a later post, I may describe the technical-workings of Bloggen…stay posted.