Minimalistic Blog

The idea is what it would take to create a very simplistic blog using markdown converter and version control system.

Requirements

What functionality is required in a simple blog.

• A layout template
• Version controlled updates
• Distributed editing
• Support for comments with authoring
• Dynamic navigation of blog items, comments
• Support for multimedia content images, audio and video
• Support for a capable markup language
• Support for visitor statistics

Solutions

• Use markdown conversion script to convert blog items to XHTML
• Use a distributed version control system to support versioning and distributed access
• Create a script to generate dynamic parts of the blog. The script could be automatically executed on the server if changes has been made
• Comments are anonymous to avoid

A completely different idea is to use instiki and use it as a blog instead of a wiki. Instiki however lacks comments and a good multimedia upload solutuion.

NestaCMS does this and much better than I ever will do. So use Nesta instead! Also see PeepCode Nesta Use which e.g. use 1kB Grid for advanced layouts.

Unsolved

• How to handle comments
• How to handle visitor statistics

Folder structure

The following folders would be needed

/published
/items
/content
/script
/template

References

• nanoc - similar projects
• octopress
• You can let go now - Mephisto end of life
• typo
• Nesta CMS - Built with Sinatra