BIog Blog Software

Previously this blog was powered by the excellent Toto, but I wanted to move to something that would generate static files so that it could be hosted on any webserver. For performance reasons, so called ‘baked’ blogs have been getting a more attention lately, for example Brent Simmons' recent plea for baked weblogs. For me it was more about finding something simple; the big popular blog softwares always seemed dauntingly complex. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything that quite matched what I wanted (Blosxom came closest).

BIog

I decided to write my own script in Io, which I gave the terrible name bIog and which I’m now using to build this blog. It’s heavily inspired by Toto, but the templates mostly use Io code for the dynamic parts of the page, and obviously it just generates a directory of static files. At under 250 lines of code, it’s small and has minimal functionality. Articles are written in markup and saved in a directory as text files which bIog then processes.

It’s not quite fully functional yet; more complex page layouts are probably not very easy to generate and there is no support for comments (although like Toto disqus could be used for comments fairly easily).

The code is available on github, along with a very basic template. To get it running you will obviously need a working install of Io. The markdown processing is done with a small Io add-on that uses the Discount library.