Quickblog

The blog code powering my blog.

See API.md on how to use this.

Compatible with babashka and Clojure.

Includes hot-reload. See it in action here.

Blogs using quickblog

Instances of quickblog can be seen here:

• Michiel Borkent's blog
• Josh Glover's blog
• Jeremy Taylor's blog
• Luc Engelen's blog - (source)
• Rattlin.blog
• REP‘ti’L‘e’

Feel free to PR yours.

Quickstart

Babashka

quickblog is meant to be used as a library from your Babashka project. The easiest way to use it is to add a task to your project's bb.edn.

This example assumes a basic bb.edn like this:

{:deps {io.github.borkdude/quickblog
        #_"You use the newest SHA here:"
        {:git/sha "389833f393e04d4176ef3eaa5047fa307a5ff2e8"}}
 :tasks
 {:requires ([quickblog.cli :as cli])
  :init (def opts {:blog-title "REPL adventures"
                   :blog-description "A blog about blogging quickly"})
  quickblog {:doc "Start blogging quickly! Run `bb quickblog help` for details."
             :task (cli/dispatch opts)}}}

To create a new blog post:

$ bb quickblog new --file "test.md" --title "Test"

To start an HTTP server and re-render on changes to files:

$ bb quickblog watch

Clojure

Quickblog can be used in Clojure with the exact same API as the bb tasks. Default options can be configured in :exec-args.

:quickblog
{:deps {io.github.borkdude/quickblog
        #_"You use the newest SHA here:"
        {:git/sha "389833f393e04d4176ef3eaa5047fa307a5ff2e8"}
        org.babashka/cli {:mvn/version "0.3.35"}}
 :main-opts ["-m" "babashka.cli.exec" "quickblog.cli" "run"]
 :exec-args {:blog-title "REPL adventures"
             :blog-description "A blog about blogging quickly"}}

After configuring this, you can call:

$ clj -M:quickblog new --file "test.md" --title "Test"

To watch:

$ clj -M:quickblog watch

etc.

Features

Markdown

Posts are written in Markdown and processed by markdown-clj, which implements the MultiMarkdown flavour of Markdown.

Metadata

Post metadata is specified in the post file using MultiMarkdown's metadata tags. quickblog expects three pieces of metadata in each post:

• Title - the title of the post
• Date - the date when the post will be published (used for sorting posts, so ISO 8601 datetimes are recommended)
• Tags - a comma-separated list of tags

quickblog new requires the title to be specified and provides sensible defaults for Date and Tags.

You can add any metadata fields to posts that you want. See the Social sharing section below for some useful suggestions.

Note: metadata may not include newlines!

favicon

NOTE: when enabling or disabling a favicon, you must do a full re-render of your site by running bb quickblog clean and then your bb quickblog render command.

To enable a favicon, add :favicon true to your quickblog opts (or use --favicon true on the command line). quickblog will render the contents of templates/favicon.html and insert them in the head of your pages.

You will also need to create the favicon assets themselves. The easiest way is to use a favicon generator such as RealFaviconGenerator, which will let you upload an image and then gives you a ZIP file containing all of the assets, which you should unzip into your :assets-dir (which defaults to assets).

You can read an example of how to prepare a favicon here: https://jmglov.net/blog/2022-07-05-hacking-blog-favicon.html

quickblog's default template expects the favicon files to be named as follows:

• android-chrome-192x192.png
• android-chrome-512x512.png
• apple-touch-icon.png
• browserconfig.xml
• favicon-16x16.png
• favicon-32x32.png
• favicon.ico
• mstile-150x150.png
• safari-pinned-tab.svg
• site.webmanifest

If any of these files are not present in your :assets-dir, a quickblog default will be copied there from resources/quickblog/assets.

Social sharing

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. display neat little preview cards when you share a link. These cards are populated from certain <meta> tags (as described in "How to add a social media share card to any website", by Michelle Mannering) and typically contain a title, description / summary, and preview image.

quickblog's base template adds meta tags for the page title for all pages and descriptions for the following pages:

• Index: {{blog-description}}
• Archive: Archive - {{blog-description}}
• Tags: Tags - {{blog-description}}
• Tag pages: Posts tagged "{{tag}}" - {{blog-description}}

If you specify a :blog-image URL option, a preview image will be added to the index, archive, tags, and tag pages. The URL should point to an image; for best results, the image should be 1200x630 and maximum 5MB in size. It may either be an absolute URL or a URL relative to :blog-root.

For post pages, meta tags will be populated from Title, Description, Image, Image-Alt, and Twitter-Handle metadata in the document.

If not specified, Twitter-Handle defaults to the :twitter-handle option to quickblog. The idea is that the :twitter-handle option is the Twitter handle of the person owning the blog, who is likely also the author of most posts on the blog. If there's a guest post, however, the guest blogger can add their Twitter handle instead.

For example, a post could look like this:

Title: Sharing is caring
Date: 2022-08-16
Tags: demo
Image: assets/2022-08-16-sharing-preview.png
Image-Alt: A leather-bound notebook lies open on a writing desk
Twitter-Handle: quickblog
Description: quickblog now creates nifty social media sharing cards / previews. Read all about how this works and how you can maximise engagement with your posts!

You may have already heard the good news: quickblog is more social than ever!
...

The value of the Image field is either an absolute URL or a URL relative to :blog-root. As noted above, images should be 1200x630 and maximum 5MB in size for best results.

Image-Alt provides alt text for the preview image, which is extremely important for making pages accessible to people using screen readers. I highly recommend reading resources like "Write good Alt Text to describe images" to learn more.

Resources for understanding and testing social sharing:

• Meta Tags debugger
• Facebook Sharing Debugger
• LinkedIn Post Inspector
• Twitter Card Validator

Templates

quickblog uses the following templates in site generation:

• base.html - All pages. Page body is provided by the {{body}} variable.
• post.html - Post bodies.
• style.css - Styles for all pages.
• favicon.html - If :favicon true, used to include favicon in the <head> of all pages.
• tags.html - Tag overview page.
• post-links.html - Used to render lists of blog posts in the archive and each page corresponding to a single tag.
• index.html - Index page. Posts containing the marker comment <!-- end-of-preview --> are included on the index page up until the first occurrence of that comment.

quickblog looks for these templates in your :templates-dir, and if it doesn't find them, will copy a default template into that directory. It is recommended to keep :templates-dir under revision control so that you can modify the templates to suit your needs and preferences.

The default templates are occasionally modified to support new features. When this happens, you won't be able to use the new feature without making the same modifications to your local templates. The easiest way to do this is to run bb quickblog refresh-templates.

Breaking changes

posts.edn removed

quickblog now keeps metadata for each blog post in the post file itself. It used to use a posts.edn file for this purpose. If you are upgrading from a version that used posts.edn, you should run bb quickblog migrate and then remove the posts.edn file.

Improvements

Feel free to send PRs for improvements.

My wishlist:

• There might be a few things hardcoded that still need to be made configurable.
• Upstream improvements to markdown-clj