coleslaw

coleslaw

Czeslaw Milosz was the writer-in-residence at UNC c. 1992. I used to see him all the time at the Hardback Cafe, always sitting at a two-top drinking coffee, reading, writing, eating chips and salsa. I remember a gentleness behind the enormous bushy eyebrows and that we called him Coleslaw. - anon

Coleslaw aims to be flexible blog software suitable for replacing a single-user static site compiler such as Jekyll.

Features

• Git for storage
• RSS feeds!
• Markdown Support with Code Highlighting provided by colorize.
  • Currently supports: Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, C, C++, Java, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Obj-C, Diff.
• Plugins to...
  • Use LaTeX (inside pairs of $$) via Mathjax
  • Import from wordpress
• There is also a Heroku buildpack maintained by Jose Pereira.

Installation

This software should be portable to any conforming Common Lisp implementation but this guide will assume SBCL is installed. Testing has also been done on CCL. Server side setup:

1. Setup git and create a bare repo as shown here.
2. Install Lisp and Quicklisp.
3. wget -c https://raw.github.com/redline6561/coleslaw/master/example.coleslawrc -O ~/.coleslawrc # and edit as necessary
4. wget -c https://raw.github.com/redline6561/coleslaw/master/example.post-receieve -O your-blog.git/hooks/post-receive # and edit as necessary
5. chmod +x your-blog/.git/hooks/post-receive
6. Create or clone your blog repo locally. Add your server as a remote with git remote add prod git@my-host.com:path/to/repo.git
7. Point the web server of your choice at the symlink /path/to/deploy-dir/.curr/

Now whenever you push a new commit to the server, coleslaw will update your blog automatically! You may need to git push -u prod master the first time.

The Post Format

Coleslaw expects post files to be formatted as follows:

;;;;;
title: foo
tags: bar, baz
date: yyyy-mm-dd timestamp
format: html (for raw html) or md (for markdown)
;;;;;
your post

Importing from Wordpress

There is a "plugin" to import from wordpress. At some point, it should be turned into a standalone script. Until then...

1. Export your posts from wordpress.
2. In your lisp of choice, do the following:
   1. (ql:quickload 'coleslaw)
   2. (in-package :coleslaw)
   3. (load-plugins '(import))
   4. (coleslaw-import::import-posts "/path/to/export.xml")

The XML will be read and placed into .post files in the :repo location specified in your .coleslawrc.

Writing your own plugins

For now, see the API and the mathjax plugin for an example. A proper guide about this will be written later.

Theming

A default theme, hyde, is provided. Themes are made using Google's closure-template and the source for hyde should be simple and instructive until I can provide better docs.