Glinda ==== Everyones favorite good witch introduction ------------ Glinda is built to extend the functionality of [Toto](https://github.com/cloudhead/toto) to offer a more complete feature set, while staying true to the original: - git powered - minimalistic - easily customized blog in 10 seconds ------------------ $ git clone git://github.com/rschmukler/dorothy-with-glinda.git myblog $ cd myblog $ heroku create myblog $ git push heroku master philosophy ---------- Glinda follows the same philosophy as Toto Everything that can be done better with another tool should be, but one should not have too much pie to stay fit. In other words, toto does away with web frameworks or DSLs such as sinatra, and is built right on top of **rack**. There is no database or ORM either, we use plain text files. Toto was designed to be used with a reverse-proxy cache, such as [Varnish](http://varnish-cache.org). This makes it an ideal candidate for [heroku](http://heroku.com). Oh, and everything that can be done with git, _is_. how it works ------------ - content is entirely managed through **git**; you get full fledged version control for free. - articles are stored as _.txt_ files, with embeded metadata (in yaml format). - articles are processed through a markdown converter (rdiscount) by default. - templating is done through **ERB**. - toto is built right on top of **Rack**. - toto was built to take advantage of _HTTP caching_. - toto was built with heroku in mind. - comments are handled by [disqus](http://disqus.com) - individual articles can be accessed through urls such as _/2009/11/21/blogging-with-toto_ - the archives can be accessed by year, month or day, wih the same format as above. - arbitrary metadata can be included in articles files, and accessed from the templates. - summaries are generated intelligently by toto, following the `:max` setting you give it. - you can also define how long your summary is, by adding `~` at the end of it (`:delim`). dorothy-with-glinda ------------------- Dorothy-with-glinda is glinda's default template, you can get it at . It comes with a very minimalistic but functional template, and a _config.ru_ file to get you started. It also includes a Gemfile file, for heroku and bundler. synopsis -------- One would start by installing _glinda_, with `sudo gem install glinda`, and then forking or cloning the `dorothy-with-glinda` repo, to get a basic skeleton: $ git clone git://github.com/rschmukler/dorothy-with-glinda.git weblog $ cd weblog/ One would then edit the template at will, it has the following structure: templates/ | +- layout.rhtml # the main site layout, shared by all pages | +- index.builder # the builder template for the atom feed | +- pages/ # pages, such as home, about, etc go here | +- index.rhtml # the default page loaded from `/`, it displays the list of articles | +- article.rhtml # the article (post) partial and page | +- about.rhtml One could then create a .txt article file in the `articles/` folder, and make sure it has the following format: title: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author: Lyman Frank Baum date: 1900/05/17 Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. If one is familiar with webby or aerial, this shouldn't look funny. Basically the top of the file is in YAML format, and the rest of it is the blog post. They are delimited by an empty line `/\n\n/`, as you can see above. None of the information is compulsory, but it's strongly encouraged you specify it. Note that one can also use `rake` to create an article stub, with `rake new`. Once he finishes writing his beautiful tale, one can push to the git repo, as usual: $ git add articles/wizard-of-oz.txt $ git commit -m 'wrote the wizard of oz.' $ git push remote master Where `remote` is the name of your remote git repository. The article is now published. ### deployment Toto is built on top of **Rack**, and hence has a **rackup** file: _config.ru_. #### on your own server Once you have created the remote git repo, and pushed your changes to it, you can run toto with any Rack compliant web server, such as **thin**, **mongrel** or **unicorn**. With thin, you would do something like: $ thin start -R config.ru With unicorn, you can just do: $ unicorn #### on heroku Toto, and subsequently Glinda, was designed to work well with [heroku](http://heroku.com), it makes the most out of it's state-of-the-art caching, by setting the _Cache-Control_ and _Etag_ HTTP headers. Deploying on Heroku is really easy, just get the heroku gem, create a heroku app with `heroku create`, and push with `git push heroku master`. $ heroku create weblog $ git push heroku master $ heroku open ### configuration You can configure toto, by modifying the _config.ru_ file. For example, if you want to set the blog author to 'John Galt', you could add `set :author, 'John Galt'` inside the `Toto::Server.new` block. Here are the defaults, to get you started: set :author, ENV['USER'] # blog author set :title, Dir.pwd.split('/').last # site title set :url, 'http://example.com' # site root URL set :prefix, '' # common path prefix for all pages set :root, "index" # page to load on / set :date, lambda {|now| now.strftime("%d/%m/%Y") } # date format for articles set :markdown, :smart # use markdown + smart-mode set :disqus, false # disqus id, or false set :summary, :max => 150, :delim => /~\n/ # length of article summary and delimiter set :ext, 'txt' # file extension for articles set :cache, 28800 # cache site for 8 hours set :to_html do |path, page, ctx| # returns an html, from a path & context ERB.new(File.read("#{path}/#{page}.rhtml")).result(ctx) end set :error do |code| # The HTML for your error page "toto, we're not in Kansas anymore (#{code})" end thanks ------ To cloudhead for the awesome Toto platform Copyright (c) 2012