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Dead Simple Blog

Version 1.1 (2022-11-15)

I've wanted for a long time to create a simple way of blogging that eschews basically all bells and whistles. Many "flat file" Content Management Systems exist already, as well as "static site generators", but none of these that I looked at were simple enough for my liking.

I don't want to have to install Ruby, or Python, or Composer, or whatever else on a server to run a blog. On the other hand, installing WordPress or one of the other popular PHP-based CMSes for this use case is like hammering in a nail with a sledgehammer.

Many people dislike PHP, and while it has its warts, I like it. I like using (vanilla) PHP simply because it is nearly ubiquitous. Having to install or configure it is often unnecessary because it is usually already installed, configured, and running.

I wanted to use plain text files, but some formatting is nice -- Markdown was the obvious solution for this, since it offers quite a lot of options in terms of text formatting, without sacrificing the readability of the plain text itself. I was not keen on adding dependencies but I found Parsedown which offers Markdown parsing by including a single PHP file. I can deal with that.

That's really all there is to it -- dead simple PHP-based templating, and Markdown-formatted plain text content.

I know I'm probably forgetting about a million edge cases, but I want to keep it simple. So, we'll roll with this for now and add features as they become necessary.

Installation

Download the files and upload them to a webserver somewhere. That's it!

Usage

  1. Duplicate config-default.php as config-custom.php, and change the config variables to your liking.
  2. Create text files with a NUMERIC file name, I use YYYY-MM-DD date-based names (e.g. 2018-10-30.md).
  3. Format text files with Markdown, or not. Whatever. ;)
  4. If you need to link to image/video/audio/etc. files, you can upload them to the media folder.
  5. Upload text files to the content directory.
  6. You're done!!

Changelog

Version 1.1

  • Updated Parsedown to 1.7.4
  • Config has now been moved to config-default.php, added support for config-custom.php
  • Added dark mode! Adjust the APPEARANCE constant to enable
  • Change default file type to .md files instead of .txt. Adjust FILE_EXT constant if needed
  • Reorganize folder structure (CSS and fonts are now in /src)
  • Small text update to /content/drafts/AboutDrafts.md
  • Defined $content in global scope to avoid PHP errors in some configurations
  • Added default favicon at /img/favicon.png
  • Including fonts.css in <head> instead of using @import for better caching behaviour
  • Added file hash query strings to <link> tags in <head> for better caching behaviour
  • index.php now uses <main> for content on list view and <article> on single post view
  • List view now explicitly sorts posts using sortPosts() function - default is sorting by filename, descending

Other Versions

User @shoaiyb has a fork going with additional features that I didn't think were "absolutely necessary" but if you want some extra bells and whistles, I recommend checking out his fork.

Attributions