rnsavinelli's fork of lb

Blogs and RSS feeds in less than 150 lines of shell script.

lb is published and distributed as a modified version of Luke Smith's lb under the GPLV3 license.

For a list of all changes made to the original script review the CHANGELOG.

For licensing details refer to the LICENSE file.

IMPORTANT: This fork will be kept up-to-date with Luke's upstream version as long as updates are proven to be useful, or valuable. For instance, commit f13cf1a seemed to be an improvement at first, but it ended up obfuscating the user's experience. See pull request #35 and commit 66e2a7a for more details.

Features

lb is an extremely small shell script that lets you write blog posts and will format them in all the ways you could ever want. Here's what it will produce:

• A Rolling Blog Page. See my own Rolling Page as an example.
• A list of all blog entries with dates: Blog List File.
• All your blog posts appear as standalone entries/pages.
• These standalone files exist in a blog/ directory, which you can allow to be browsed manually via your Apache web server.
• Blog posts are added, in full form, to an RSS feed of your chosing as well, see my RSS feed.
• Posts in the rolling blog have divs that can easily be modified via a CSS stylesheet, and in general everything is easily editable.
• One command to delete published entries from the RSS feed, rolling blog and standalone entries simultaneously.
• Published blog entries can now be revised, updating the standalone blog pages, the RSS feed and everything else.

Usage

lb commands are all one letter cause its simpler. They all stand for something though.

./lb n(ew)	# Make a new blog post draft.
./lb e(dit)	# Edit a draft of an entry.
./lb t(rash)	# Delete a draft of an entry.
./lb l(ist)	# List all drafts.
./lb p(ublish)	# Finalize/publish a blog post draft.

./lb d(elete)	# Delete a published blog post.
./lb r(evise)	# Revise an already published entry (you can republish it with `lb p` when done).
./lb h(istory)	# List published entries (publication history)

Installation

• bash and GNU sed is required.
• Be sure that you own or have writing privileges in the given directory, so the script can create the required directory structure.
• Download the lb script and put it in your website's main directory. The expectation is that your rolling blog file and RSS feed will be there as well.
• Open the script and change the first few variables to match the names of the files you use in your website.
• Add markers for where the new blog posts are added. Don't skip this step. See below.

Markers

For the system to work, add the following comment line to a (1) Rolling Blog File (as above), a (2) Blog List File and (3) RSS feed. See the example files provided with lb to have a better picture.

<!-- LB -->

You can format these files/pages how ever you want, just be sure to edit the lb file and change the variables at the top to match the file names of those you chose.

When you finalize a blog post, it will be added directly below that line in the proper format (either HTML or the proper RSS/XML format), give you the rolling blog and RSS feed for free.

Info

• The blog entries are stored in blog/ in your websites root directory. Drafts are in blog/.drafts.
• blog/.htaccess acts as a "database" file. lb stores filenames with their corresponding proper names and publishing dates there.
• The other files in this repo just illustrate how you can use lb. Only the lb script itself is necessary.
• Your $EDITOR variable should be set to your preferred text editor, vim will be assumed if you don't have one set.