Texted - Free your text!

Why did I create one blog system instead of using some existing blog platform?

1. I am writing in some other platforms, such as dev.to/thiagomg however if they lose their data or close their platform, I don't want to lose what I've written
2. I wanted to learn Rust, therefore I created a blog system
3. If I get the blog posts, with the way they are structured here and add to github/gitlab/etc, it will just work (adding a header to the files)

Getting started

Installing

cargo install texted

Bootstrapping a new blog

# Let's create a new directory for our new blog
mkdir ~/my-awesome-blog && cd ~/my-awesome-blog
# And now create the skeleton of a fully functional blog
texted-tool bootstrap --out-dir .

Now, let's run and test it.

# Inside the same ~/my-awesome-blog directory, run
texted

And open in your browser http://127.0.0.1:8001/

Adding a new post

Texted by default caches all urls and posts for best performance. Please quit texted and run again to see new posts in the listing. If you want to disable rendering cache to see changes in the post content without restarting, change rendering_cache_enabled = false in the texted.toml configuration file

# Still inside the same ~/my-awesome-blog directory, run
pushd posts/

# This will create one directory such as 20240428_how_to_write_a_new_blog_post
# with a file index.md inside.
texted-tool post --title "How to write a new blog post" -o dir

# And let's run texted again
popd
texted

You now have a new post available in the post list

Building from sources

How to build?

cargo build --release

How to run?

cargo run --bin texted

How to personalise my site?

You can create your HTML templates using mustache templates. The examples show all supported fields

Templates can have images, css and js, etc. Those support files should live in the public directory

In the file texted.toml, you can configure the location in the keys:

• template_dir
• public_dir

How to add posts and pages?

Posts live in the directory pointed in the configuration key posts_dir and pages in the key pages_dir

The only difference between pages and posts are:

1. Pages are rendered using page.tpl template. Posts are rendered using view.tpl template
2. Posts are listed the the list API (server-address/list) while pages are not listed

From now on, all said about posts directory structure also is the same for pages

There are 2 ways to add posts. Inside posts configured directory, you can create a mardown file or a directory.

File posts

Let's say your server is running in your local host, port 8080 (127.0.0.1:8080) and posts are inside the post directory.

File posts are text-only posts (or posts without local images). The file name will be used as url. E.g.

The file post/post_without_images.md will be accesible using the url http://127.0.0.1:8080/view/post_without_images

Directory posts

Directories containing a file index.md (configurable in the file texted.toml), will be treated as a post. E.g.

The directory post/post_with_image will be accesible using the url http://127.0.0.1:8080/view/post_with_image

Structure of a post

Header

Each post or page markdown file contains a header with a unique identification, date and author. It is followed by the post title. The html comment is optional, but some markdown editors screw up the header if not in an html comment, so I added it in the example

<!--
[ID]: # (21c1e9ad-4ebb-4168-a543-fbf77cc35a85)
[DATE]: # (2024-02-12 22:54:00.000)
[AUTHOR]: # (thiago)
-->

# How does it work?

Everything after that is the body of the post

More

In the post list, what is presented is a part of the post body. To determine when it stops, you add the <!-- more --> tag.

See post_without_images.md or post_with_image/index.md for an example

Tip

If you run the texted-post binary, it will create a post skeleton with header, title and sample body to you.