plog

Plog stands for Pragmatic Blog, it's a name derived from PPLOG, one of my old projects, it's no longer mantained, but the idea was a simplistic blog, PPLOG is just one big perl file, you drop on your webserver, and it just works.

Plog, on the other hand, is oriented at developers, and runs on the desktop, it generate a bunch of static HTML files which you can then upload to any webserver, no server configuration, no hassle, just plain HTML files.

Plog is still on development, it's on .Net, but it can also be run on Linux using Mono. The idea is to set up a configuration file, conveniently named config.json, and just run the plog command on the console to generate static HTML files based on your configuration and layout.

The workflow could be something like this

• Create a folder named Blog
• Create a folder named Entries inside Blog
• Create a Markdown file in the Entries folder, with the name "yyyy-mm-dd Entry Title.md", for example "2012-10-02 My First Entry.md"
• Open a terminal / console and navigate to the Blog folder
• Run the plog command

That will generate HTML files in /Blog/Deploy, based on your configuration and layout. Whenever you add or modify a file, just run the plog command again to re-generate all the files.

More information about the usage will be added on future posts, but once you have set up your environment, all you'll have to do is create a  .md file, and run the plog command, if you use git you can use github to host your blog, and update your blog using your favourite editor and the terminal.

Plog will also be able to upload the generated file using FTP if specified in the configuration.