There are a million and one ways to start a blog. You can get a Wordpress blog, or a Blogger blog, or download one of the millions of blogging frameworks for Ruby on Rails or Django. Any of these methods will give you a lovely blog, with many stunning features and shiny GUIs and stuff. Minimalog does not have those things.

Do you want a nice web-based UI for writing your posts, with WYSIWYG editing? Minimalog doesn't have that.

Do you want nice comment filtering so you don't have to worry about spam? Minimalog doesn't have that either.

Do you want it to play the bassoon? Minimalog doesn't do that, but to be fair I don't think Wordpress does either. Certainly not without a plugin.

Minimalog exists for people who have enough tech savvy that they want a blog they can host themselves that does exactly one thing, blogging, not very well. It is intended to be a lightweight blog framework which is fast (ish) and secure (ish).

The basic configuration can be downloaded from Github and uploaded to Heroku with minimal effort. Such a configuration uses no Javascript, has no off-site links and generally doesn't do anything but allow you to post blog posts.

It should be possible to integrate this easily into an existing Django app: I think I've moved as much information as possible into the app itself. If you try and find that you need to make other changes to integrate Minimalog, I welcome Pull Requests.

If you aren't familiar with the command-line, you should probably look elsewhere for your blogging framework. Minimalog expects you to provide blog posts to it in Markdown format, and provides a script for adding posts hosted off-site (e.g. on GitHub) into the blog proper. This script will need to be called from the command line (or the Heroku toolbelt), and you will be expected to be comfortable with editing plain text files for config.

• Secure. There are no logins or login options available for either administrators or commenters, so there is nothing to be abused. No input from commenters is trusted, and the ORM should limit the exposure to SQL injection.

• Anonymous. As noted above, Minimalog does not provide accounts for posters, administrators or commenters. Additionally, no analytics are provided in the default configuration. Minimalog does not keep track of anyone.

• Lightweight. Because of its limited functionality, Minimalog is small. Aside from translating posts out of Markdown format, Minimalog does almost nothing.

• Fast(-ish). The default install of Minimalog does not use Javascript or much in the way of complex backend logic, and expects static files to be hosted separately (e.g. in AWS). This should keep the blog fast.

It's not all that hard. To get hold of the software, clone this repository. Then, make sure you have all the packages installed, by running: pip install -r requirements.txt. Next, make sure you have an Amazon S3 account, and an empty S3 bucket. Then, you need to make the following changes. First, replace the about.html template with something that suits you better. Then, create a file called personal_settings.py in the same directory as the already-existing settings.py file. In this file, define some constants.

First, define the ones that are traditionally in the Django settings.py file:

• DEBUG. False if you are in production, True for testing.
• TEMPLATE_DEBUG. I set this equal to DEBUG.
• DATABASES. This depends on what database you're using. To see the correct format, look at the Django docs.
• STATIC_URL. The URL to the S3 bucket you're storing your static files.
• AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME. The name of the S3 bucket you're storing your static files in.
• SECRET_KEY. This should be a random string used as a seed for the Django random number generator.

Next, define the compulsory ones for Minimalog:

• BLOG_AUTHOR. The name of the person authoring the blog.
• BLOG_FULL_TITLE. The full-length title of the blog, e.g. 'My superawesome blog!'
• BLOG_SHORT_TITLE. A short-form version of the blog title, e.g 'Superblog'.
• BLOG_PRE_TITLE. A string that will be placed before the titles of some of the pages, e.g. 'Superblog | '.
• BLOG_ATTRIBUTION. The string you want to use as the attribution, e.g. 'Created by Barney the Purple Dinosaur, 2052.'
• BLOG_DESCRIPTION. A short string describing your blog for Google.

In the same file, you may define any of the following. They will be automatically added to your sidebar.

• GITHUB_LINK. A link to your GitHub page.
• CODERWALL_LINK. A link to your Coderwall.
• GPLUS_LINK. A link to your Google+ Profile.
• LINKEDIN_LINK. A link to your LinkedIn profile.
• TWITTER_LINK. A link to your Twitter profile.

Finally, define two environment variables in your shell:

• S3_KEY. Your Amazon S3 key.
• S3_SECRET_KEY. Your Amazon S3 secret key.

With those defined, you should be ready to go! Make sure that all of the tests run, by running python manage.py test posts, and ensuring they pass.

Then, upload all the static files you need to your S3 bucket, by running python manage.py collectstatic. With that done, you should be ready to go!

Depends. If you have access to the Django shell, you can import the Post model and add them by hand. If not, I have provided a Django command that takes the URL of a raw Markdown document and adds it to the DB. To run it, run: python manage.py addpost <post_url>.

As an example, you can store your blog posts on Github. If you do so, and you want to add them to the DB, you must use the link to the raw version of the file.

Minimalog is licensed under the MIT license. This gives you a wide range of rights. I think it'd be polite if you acknowledged me if you use Minimalog, but my self-esteem isn't so low that you have to.

This project uses the excellent Skeleton CSS framework as a base point for the included CSS: I'd like to thank Dave Gamache and his collaborators for their hard work.

I'd also like to thank all of the people who have worked on all of the modules listed in requirements.txt, who are too numerous to be listed here.