Hello New Blog

For a long time I looked for an easy way to maintain a blog. I looked at Hugo, Jekyll, Middleman, and Nanoc. All great, versatile tools but still too heavy for my basic needs.

Requirements:

• Git-based.
• Command-line based.
• Static self-contained HTML files.
• Adding a new blog post consists of creating a Markdown file.
• Occasionally I want to post (or rather “recycle”) a snippet or a random thought stored in a GitHub Gist.
• Sometimes I post a bunch of tweets (“tweetstorm”) which I like to use as a blog post.

To scratch this itch I developed a basic blog publishing tool called MsgTrail. The source code can be found here.

MsgTrail has the following features:

• Content sources:
  • Local Markdown files.
  • GitHub Gists.
  • Tweets including support for tweetstorm stitching.
• User interface: command line.
• End result: self-contained HTML.
• Hosting: no (bring your own).
• Search: no (rudimentary support for Google’s site: feature).
• Archive page: yes.
• Feed: yes (Atom).

Check out the documentation on how to install and use MsgTrail.

I use MsgTrail to maintain this blog. The source code of the msgtrail.com blog can be found here.