Creating a tumblelog with blohg
Warning: This post relies on unreleased blohg features. You will need to install blohg from the Mercurial repository or use the live ebuild (=www-apps/blohg-9999), if you are a Gentoo user. Please ignore this warning after blohg-1.0 release.
Tumblelogs are old stuff, but services like Tumblr popularized them a lot recently. Thumblelogs are a quick and simple way to share random content with readers. They can be used to share a link, a photo, a video, a quote, a chat log, etc.
blohg is a good blogging engine, we know, but what about tumblelogs?!
You can already share videos from Youtube and Vimeo, and can share most of the other stuff manually, but it is boring, and diverges from the main objective of the tumblelogs: simplicity.
To solve this issue, I developed a blohg extension (Yeah, blohg-1.0 supports extensions! \o/ ) that adds some cool reStructuredText directives:
link
This directive is used to share links. It will embed the content of the link to the post automatically, if the provided link is from a service that supports the oEmbed protocol. If it isn't, and the link is from a HTML page, it will include the link with the title of the page to the post. Otherwise it will just include the raw link to the post.
Usage example:
.. link:: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp30v6XMxBg
quote
This directive is used to share quotes. It will create a blockquote element with the quote and add a signature with the author name, if provided.
Usage example:
.. quote::
:author: Myself
This is a random quote!
chat
This directive is used to share chat logs. It will add a div with the chat log, highlighted with Pygments.
Usage example:
.. chat::
[00:56:38] <rafaelmartins> I'm crazy.
[00:56:48] <rafaelmartins> I chat alone.
You can see the directives in action on my shiny new tumblelog:
The source code of the tumblelog, including the blohg extension and the mobile-friendly templates, is available here:
http://hg.rafaelmartins.eng.br/blogs/rafael.martins.im/
I have no plans to release this extension as part of blohg, but feel free to use it if you find it useful!
That's all!
