 Okay so I wanted to show people something I've been working on that I think might be useful to a lot of you guys and that is the past couple of week or so the past week or so I've been working on I so I've wanted to have a blog on my website for a long time just because you know I want to like I want to put up updates just to keep me on task and stuff like that so especially now that I'm starting my dissertation and I'm gonna be like I'm basically gonna be a neat like I don't have to go to classes or anything at a daily basis so it'd be nice to keep myself on task now I am not a big fan of a lot of blogging software out there you know I don't want to use WordPress or anything that's too bloated I want to have something that just generates HTML pages really simply not even a static page generator just something that's very like makes sense I don't have to you know write anything and mark down and convert it to HTML and do all the silly stuff so I ended up writing a little blog system that might be worth checking out if you're interested so it's actually written in less than a hundred lines of shell script in fact I think it's if I actually look at it I think it's considerably less yeah it's just 71 lines that's all you need but it does everything that I need and it gives you some nice different interfaces that might be interesting let me show you how it looks on my website so right now I just have it here so there are different inner different ways of looking at it so the page I have linked here is a rolling blog page and this is originally the only thing I wanted but it has other stuff in addition to this and that is when I put up in a blog entry it appears here as a you know a new entry of course they're in chronological order auto generates the date gives me a title one of the nice things that it is it generates links so it generates the first link is like a link to the header so if I click on this link it actually takes me directly to the header and of course you can copy this I'm not even on my website I'm on the offline one but it doesn't matter but you can just copy the HTML that it generates in the standalone link if you want to link directly to that entry so you can just copy this share with someone else and it goes directly to that entry as you know you probably have seen in other sites but it's nice having this automatic additionally in addition to that it generates a link to a standalone page so if you just want to view one alone you can do that just as well now I don't have the kind of thing where like it cuts off after a point I might integrate that later but really my goal like what I want to have like what I like in blogs is when they're just everything is just on one page and if you only use plain text it doesn't really get that big so my idea is like right my blog page here this isn't part of the system necessarily but mine is 2008.html and my idea is after 2008 I'll start using 2009 or something like that that way the pages don't get too big but my idea is like on this page everything should be there but you know if you don't like it you can probably change the script around but so it generates these links it generates standalone pages and stuff like that it also when you finalize a link it automatically adds it to the RSS feed so you can check my RSS feed and you'll see that all the syntax is actually here as well actually let me just open up my RSS feed manually so you'll see that it generates it of course it takes that HTML takes all the metadata it needs and puts it into some kind of you know it gives it a unique ID the date it's stuff like that then it needs to be read properly by RSS readers so all of that is like totally automatic let me show you how you actually use oh in the other interface I should say which is something I've been playing around I don't know if you checked out my website recently but I've been playing around with this for other stuff like you know Apache has this you know we're all familiar with it probably but people don't use it much often like where Apache can just generate the directory contents for a folder so you can see the content contents of my ProtoIndoEuropean folder here but the same thing is true of the blog posts so you can go to slash blog and these are actually out order because I've been playing around with them but if you don't mess around with them since you're not figuring out the system like I am it'll automatically add them and you can list them in chronological order or something like that if you don't know how to do this for you know Apache just look up how to make an Apache what is it like indexes or something like that but anyway so how does this blog system actually work what's the actual interface I'm gonna go to my website directory and you'll see here the script here LB that's the name of my blog system is Simlinked so if you just run it by default it gives you some directions but I'll talk about those in a second to add a new entry it really just has three commands new finalize and delete so new it asks for a title let's say you know this is a blog post title and you go into it opens up I think and it might be VAM I might want to change it to your default editor but it opens up you know a page where you can actually add the content so this is the content and of course this is you know it's just an HTML so you can do whatever you want here save that and now when you're done modifying the file it's actually stored as it says here it's stored in a blog slash dot drafts now if you want to get rid of that draft all you have to do is just RM it that's all you have to do but if you want to finalize it what you should do is run LB finalize and that will give you a list of all your drafts currently I just have one so I'm gonna pick that one and it's now finalized now what that means is it adds it first off to the HTML like rolling blog page so here it is here this is the content or just a standalone page this is the content of a nice and simple as the author name below and stuff on the standalone page and it also it's not gonna work on my URL link but I can because I haven't updated my website but if I go to my RSS feed offline you'll see that here it's all been added to the RSS feed the RSS feed or whatever so all of that is automatic now let's say this is just an example post I don't actually want to push this to my website so what you can do is just run LB delete to delete an old post and that generates a list of all the posts that you have and I want to get rid of I should probably have this ordered chronologically that would be a little easier but yeah I'll do that in a second so all you have to do is select the one you want to get rid of say yes and then it actually it deletes the file the standalone file and it also deletes all that information from the RSS feed and the rolling blog page so if I go back to this this that entry is now going to be gone okay so that's pretty much all the system does it again it's really simple you just create blog posts and it'll convert it to RSS syntax and whatever else you need if you want to delete a post it will do that automatically so one thing the one thing it doesn't do since it's not like a database or it doesn't generate pages on the fly is if you want to modify a post you would basically have to modify the standalone page and the you know the the rolling blog list and the RSS feed separately that's not the intended interface just because and it would probably be a little more difficult to add something like that just because there can be a there can be a lot that varies between files so I mean I I'm the kind of person I don't like revise things like I don't believe in correcting spelling checks or spelling mistakes or whatever so I don't care but you know whatever so it might not be for you if you're the kind of person who is like that that's what I'm trying to say and the last thing is what is the last thing just two seconds ago in my head I was like oh I got to say this one more thing what is the last thing I have to say I don't know maybe that is it I'm gonna forget I'm gonna turn off the camera and come back in a second when I remember okay I remember the last thing is the the other thing that's sort of important to remember is like when it's generating these entries in the web like the rolling blog page all of this is like I mean it actually creates if you look at the source of it it is a div of the class entry or something like this so all the user interface or not user interface all the decoration I have like the fact that this is a slightly darker gray and the sidebar here all of that is just CSS so for a lot of this stuff if you want like a your blog to look totally different from mine you can change it all the stuff like how injury individual injuries look or how you know if you want them all as individual squares on a page or something something totally unreadable all of that's a possibility all the thing does and well I should say you can go into the actual script and change any number of variables of the things you know that are at stake so of course you know here you can set your individual website which is obviously not the same as mine you're gonna want to change that or the stuff up here you can also change I think yeah things like the header or the footer to the the individual page the date that is displayed on the website this stuff is lower down because it has to be called lower down but yeah so you can play around with it again it is less than 75 lines so it doesn't have all the functionality and that again it can't like you know like change the content of already published blogs unless you want to do it manually but yeah I've really enjoyed like this is pretty much all I need for a blog so it's probably the kind of stuff I'm gonna be using so anyway but that's about it and I'll see you guys next time hope you learned something