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How-to build a simple blog site

Goals

Setting up a simple blog for myself. Simple means for me small software, not many dependencies, no database.

Requirements

The blogging software ...

  • is easy to build, package and run everywhere. On my local laptop or any server.
  • can be hostsed locally
  • uses Markdown
  • is able to use themes

Investigation

First we are trying to find a suitable blog/wiki software to run our blog. I have tried these solutions:

  • MDwiki - looks like a good software but installation failed on my pc at least.
  • MkDocs - simple and works like a charm.
  • dokuwiki - good and well maintained software with a big list of plugins but it seems that it does not support plain markdown

At the end of my investigation choose for MkDocs because it is very simple, meeting my needs and can be configured very simple way.

Workflow

Prerequesites

  • Running Linux like Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, ...

Prepare Python virtualenv

apt-get install python virtualenv
virtualenv .venv

Install mkdocs

prepare file requirements.txt

pip
mkdocs
mkdocs-bootswatch

install software using pip

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U -r requirements.txt

Create blog page

mkdocs new blog
cd blog

Run

vi mkdocs.yml
vi docs/index.md
mkdocs serve

Point your browser to http://localhost:8000 to test it

Conclusion

With mkdocs is it quite easy to setup simple websites like blogs and run this on any system.

Created: 2018-05-27 
Updated: 2018-06-03