The blog of dlaa.me

Almost 5 years ago, I moved my blog (and website) from a hosted environment to a Node.js implementation of my own creation. At the time, I was new to Node and this was a great way to learn. That code has served me well, but over time I've found a few things I wanted to change - in part due to the rapid growth of the Node platform. Some of the changes were foundational, so I chose to do a rewrite instead of multiple revisions.

The rewrite ended up taking about twice as long as I anticipated, but I'm glad I did it. The new architecture is similar to what it was before - and the user interface almost identical - but there are some nice improvements and modernizations under the hood. Of note, the rendering was separated so it's easy to customize (there are samples for a text blog and a photo blog; the unit tests are implemented as a blog, too), search is much more powerful (with inclusion, exclusion, partial matches, etc.), and the code is simplified by the removal of some undue complexity (mostly features I thought were neat but that added little). Finally, because the new project was written to be reused for other purposes and by other people, I'm able to share it.

For context, the project goals are:

• An easy way to create a simple, secure website with a blog
• Support for text-based and photo-based blog formats
• Easy authoring in HTML, Markdown (with code formatting), or JSON
• Ordering of posts by publish date or content date
• Easy customization of site layout and formatting
• High resolution (2x) support for photo blog images
• Support for Windows and Linux hosting with Node.js
• Simple post format that separates content and metadata
• Ability to author hidden posts and schedule a publish date
• Ability to create posts that never show up in the timeline
• Support for archive links and tagging of posts by category
• Quick search of post content, including simple search queries
• Automatic Twitter and Open Graph metadata for social media
• Automatic cross-linking of related posts
• No JavaScript requirement for client browsers

To learn more about the code, its dependencies, and how to use it, please visit: simple-website-with-blog on GitHub

To see it in action, just browse this blog and site. :)