Blog from the Command Line with bashblog

Productivity Sauce

Static blog generators come in all shapes and sizes, but probably few of them can rival the simplicity and elegance of bashblog. As the name implies, bashblog is written in Bash. In fact, the entire blog engine consists of a single Bash shell script, so deploying bashblog couldn't be easier. Grab the script from the project's GitHub repository, and move it to a separate directory for your blog. Open bashblog in a text editor, and adjust the global variables, such as the blog's title, description, URL, author, etc. Alternatively, you can create a separate configuration file and specify the desired values in it using the key=name format (don't forget to update the global_config=".config" parameter in the script, so it points to the configuration file). Once you've done that make sure that the global $EDITOR variable is set. To do this, use the following commands (replace nano with the text editor of your choice):

EDITOR=nano
export EDITOR

Run then the ./bb.sh command, and you should see the script's usage info. To create your first blog, run the ./bb.sh post command. This opens a blog post template in the specified text editor. Once you're done editing, save the post and close the editor. You will be prompted to save the post as draft, edit it again, or post. When you choose the latter option, bashblog automatically generates the necessary files in the current directory. All you have to do then is to upload everything to your server.

Despite the fact that the entire script is only 700 lines long, bashblog offers a wide range of features, including the ability to save posts as drafts for later editing, support for RSS, integration with Google Analytics and Feedburner, backup, and much more. In other words, if you are looking for a simple yet flexible tool for generating static blogs, bashblog fits the bill quite nicely.