A ‘blogging’ platform for terminal! (Blogging for curl)

First off this was just a little thought experiment inspired by reducing website bloat and resource hungry software.

What was the smallest possible footprint of blogging platform, that was actually useful, that I could devise.

A few things it would have to have:

1) A way to format text (titles and the like) 2) A way to easily create and manage posts 3) A way for users to navigate content

The result was the clog! A blog readable using curl (curl + blog = clog)

Basically the most bandwidth and resources light way of creating a blog was reading text files with ansi escaped text formatting.

Each clog sits in a folder “clog/” in a website’s root and must contain an “index” file that holds details of all the posts in the clog.

Each post is a numbered file with the content.

A simple shell script provides the ability to create date stamped and titles posts; creating both the post itself and the reference to the post in the index.

Example clog :

curl -s www.jameschip.io/clog/index

I then wrote another script that acts as a clog viewer providing basic bookmarking abilities and navigation.

All in all I think this is the most light weight “useful” blogging solution ever.

You can easily blog (clog) in your terminal now.

See the scripts: https://github.com/jameschip/clogs