April 03, 2008 Archives

Thu Apr 3 04:22:12 UTC 2008

vee -- a simple text blog engine

I'm just a command-line person I guess. I've set up a new blog at http://tommix.net/ covering Information Security topics, and I've chosen to use vee, the blog tool to power it with. In order to interact with vee (i.e. post new entries) you run vee from the command line and it fires up $EDITOR

This blog runs with nanoblogger, which has the same interaction style – ssh in to the host machine, run nb and get $EDITOR … both engines also generate static HTML, which is easy to serve with a lightweight and secure webserver. Both can be driven non-interactively, which might provide an interesting way to hack a feed up for random data-sources …

Nanoblogger handles blog entries and articles, provides a calendar-based archive access, ‘recent changes’ section, categories indexing and overall looks like a much bigger blog engine. Vee just lists your blog entries in time order.

With a small amount of hacking, I've fitted the Disqus comment system into vee (yeah, it's just one line of HTML, I know), nominated quill as the blog entry markup language, generated an Atom feed, and provided an error page that has similar contents to the index …

Vee is written in Bourne shell (/bin/sh, which is often linked to the Bourne Again shell on Linux boxes), and although I've hacked the main script a little bit, most of the customisation has been able to play out in local per-instance scripts. Because it has so few files to update, it is noticeably quicker than nb.


Posted by Jim Cheetham | Permanent Link