This file is called minblog, short for "minimalist blog". It's an attempt at creating the simplest possible blogging framework that meets these conditions: - No build step - Markdown support - Math equation support - Automatic generation of the list of posts - No need to learn an obscure syntax to enter posts - Everything in a single file - you should be able to email the full blog to someone else, or download it using the Save As option in the browser. # Motivation It's common to hear that hosting your own blog is only for programmers and other technical folk. They're told to sign up for a hosted solution such as wordpress.com. They're told that it would be too much of a technical hurdle for them to do anything other than dumping their data into someone else's walled garden. I strongly disagree. Options like Wordpress do nothing to free you from having to learn a new technology. They free you from *installing software*, but after you've signed up for your account, you're right back to learning a bunch of technical details. Anyone capable of using WordPress can host their own blog on Github Pages. They can open a Github account, they can click the buttons to create a new repo, and they can click the buttons to turn on Github Pages. Anyone claiming otherwise needs to get out of the basement and talk to humans in real life from time to time. Once they've created their repo, they can either use the online Github editor or they can work locally and upload their edited file. The few people that can't do that are surely not able to use Wordpress. # Installation There is no installation. # Usage Open this file in a text editor. To add a new post, go to the top and type <blog title="..."> where the `...` is the title of your post. Type your post in markdown format. When you're done, add a closing tag: </blog> Open the file in a web browser. You can put markdown in here as long you don't close out the `blog` tag. - Lists work - Even has math support: $y_{t} = \xi_{t}$. The markdown variant I'm using is [markdown-it](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it). You can see below the links used to load the library. If you want to use a different markdown library, all you have to do is delete the markdown-it lines and add your own. Further, markdown-it comes with math support, so katex is loaded. You can delete those two lines below if you don't plan to use math in your blog. The only place the markdown library is called is the `md.render` call in the `changecontent` function. If you change markdown libraries, you'll need to change that call. There's very little CSS in here: - Widescreen monitors these days are *too wide* to go without some limits. - Links do not look good with underlines on here. I use underlines in some of my own html pages, but you don't want them here, where links are used for lists of blog posts. - It's dead simple to change the styling yourself. - Go to the `style` tag below. - Add the CSS you want. - Profit. - Use [W3Schools](https://www.w3schools.com) if you're not sure how to add particular CSS.