Minimal blog

The least possible blog is a page per post with title and body text, and an index page that has a reverse-chronological list of links to posts. Without adding support for static files the options for styling the pages are very limited, but we can embed a stylesheet in the pages for a first approximation.

the least possible implementation is a command, which for now is mismiy (pronounced ‘miss me?’). It consumes posts (in Markdown prefixed with YAML metadata) and templates (in Mustache format) and writes HTML. By default these are files in directories named posts, partials, and pub.

mismiy -o pub -p partials posts

You can view the result as a web site by, for example, running Python’s simple web server there:

cd pub; python -m http.server

The code is written in Python in test-first fashion, though the code is pretty simple so far—I spent more time trying to decide which Markdown library to use than writing the code that uses it.

Obvious future features include:

• static files, such a style sheets;
• other data, such as a blogroll;
• non-post pages, such as an about page;
• a ‘watch’ mode for mismiy that regenerates the blog when files are edited;
• publication dates, controlling when posts are publicly visible;
• feeds;
• tags and categorization.

And many more.