blogophon

:trumpet: A Static Site Generator supporting Markdown, responsive images, RSS and other RESTable files. Built with Node.js and minimal dependencies.

fboes
8
1
JavaScript

Blogophon

A Static Site Generator supporting Markdown, responsive images, RSS and other RESTful files. Built with Node.js and minimal dependencies.

A live example of this blog generator can be found at 3960! Journal.

Features

  • The Blogophon generates static HTML files from Markdown articles. These HTML files can be synchronized to remote servers and are fully independent of the Blogophon generator.
  • It uses simple, fast and hackable templating via Mustache. It also supports multiple themes.
  • Generates a bunch of ways to find your articles: Regular index pages, tag pages, author pages.
  • The Blogophon comes with a built-in image-scaler for responsive images.
  • The default theme puts all relevant meta stuff into <head> for SEO and social sharing (via schema.org and OpenGraph) as well as the IndieWeb.
  • A ton of special features like RSS/ATOM newsfeeds, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Progressive Web App (PWA), Facebook Instant Articles, sending Webmentions, Gopher-support etc.
  • As the Blogophon only consists of static pages, there is no personal data (cookies, etc.) aggregated by your blog - therefore it is easy to comply with any form of privacy protection law (like the GDPR).

Requirements

The Blogophon generator works on every platform with NodeJs. This includes Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. The Blogophon can also be installed directly on your web host, as long as you have NodeJs installed on your web host and SSH access. The Blogophon generators generates your blog pages.

Your generated blog pages are independent of the Blogophon software, and can be hosted on any web hosting service - it only consists of static files. You will need no PHP, MySQL or anything like that.

Installation

  1. Make sure you have Node.js with at least version 6 installed. Call node -v to see your current version.
  2. Make sure you have ImageMagick installed. Call magick -version to see your current version. ImageMagick is needed for scaling images.
  3. Run npm install -g blogophon to install the Blogophon. If you do not have Node version 6 but at least Node version 4, install Blogophon 1.3.0 by calling npm install -g [email protected].
  4. Change to a folder you want to initialize a Blogophon blog project in.
  5. Run blogophon to start the configuration dialogue and enable special features.
  6. Set your web server’s document root folder to htdocs of your Blogophon blog project (as this will be the folder where the HTML files will be generated by the Blogophon Generator).

How it works

Just call blogophon to open the Blogophon command menu in the folder you are in. There you will be able to create, edit, generate and publish Markdown articles.

The basic work-flow is this:

  1. Create a Markdown article (see Blogophon’s Markdown reference on details).
  2. Generate HTML files from your Markdown article via the Blogophon generator.
  3. Optional: Publish your HTML files to a remote server.

The main menu in action.

If you are a CLI wizard, you may also want to take a look at Blogophon’s special CLI features.

Update

  1. To find out if your Blogophon needs updating, run npm outdated -g blogophon.
  2. Run npm update -g blogophon to update your local Blogophon installation to the latest stable release.

Feedback

In case of issues or suggestions for the Blogophon consider using Blogophon’s issue board.

Status

npm version
Build Status
Dependency Status
devDependency Status

Legal stuff

Author: Frank Boës

Copyright & license: See LICENSE.txt