coleslaw

Czeslaw Milosz was the writer-in-residence at UNC c. 1992. I used to see him all the time at the Hardback Cafe, always sitting at a two-top drinking coffee, reading, writing, eating chips and salsa. I remember a gentleness behind the enormous bushy eyebrows and that we called him Coleslaw. - anon

Coleslaw is Flexible Lisp Blogware similar to Frog, Jekyll, or Hakyll.

Have questions? Come talk to us on IRC in #coleslaw on Freenode!

Features

• Git for storage

• RSS and Atom feeds

• Markdown Support with Code Highlighting provided by colorize

  • Currently supports: Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp, Scheme, C, C++, Java, Python, Erlang, Haskell, Obj-C, Diff.

• A Plugin API and plugins for...

  • Static Pages
  • Sitemap generation
  • Incremental builds
  • Analytics via Google or Piwik
  • Comments via Disqus or isso
  • Hosting via Github Pages or Amazon S3
  • Embedding gfycats
  • Tweeting about new posts
  • Using LaTeX via Mathjax
  • Writing posts in ReStructured Text
  • Importing posts from Wordpress
  • Code Highlighting via Pygments instead of colorize

Example Sites

See the wiki for a list of coleslaw-powered blogs.

Hacking

A core goal of coleslaw is to be both pleasant to read and easy to hack on and extend. If you want to understand the internals and bend coleslaw to do new and interesting things, I strongly encourage you to read the Hacker's Guide to Coleslaw. You'll find some current TODO items towards the bottom.

Installation

Coleslaw should run on any conforming Common Lisp implementation but testing is primarily done on SBCL and CCL.

Coleslaw can either be run manually on a local machine or triggered automatically on git push to a server. If you want a server install, run these commands on your server after setting up a git bare repo. Otherwise, run the commands on your local machine.

1. Install a Common Lisp implementation (we recommend SBCL) and Quicklisp.
2. Place a config file for coleslaw in your $HOME directory. If you want to run multiple blogs with coleslaw, you can keep each blog's config file in that blog's repo. Feel free to copy and edit the example config or consult the config docs to create one from scratch.
3. This step depends on whether you're setting up a local or server install.
   • Server Install: Copy and chmod +x the example post-receive hook to your blog's bare repo.
   • Local Install: Just run the following commands in the REPL whenever you're ready to regenerate your blog:

     (ql:quickload :coleslaw)
     (coleslaw:main "/path/to/my/blog/")
     

4. Optionally, point the web server of your liking at your config-specified :deploy-dir. Or "deploy-dir/.curr" if the versioned plugin is enabled.
5. If you use Emacs, consider installing coleslaw-mode to author your posts.

Now just write posts, git commit and build by hand or by push.

The Content Format

Coleslaw expects content to have a file extension matching the class of the content. (I.e. .post for blog posts, .page for static pages, etc.)

There should also be a metadata header on all files starting and ending with the config-specified :separator, ";;;;;" by default. Example:

;;;;;
title: foo
tags: bar, baz
date: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
format: html (for raw html) or md (for markdown)
excerpt: Can also be extracted from content (see :excerpt-sep config param)
;;;;;
your post

Posts require the title: and format: fields. Pages require the title: and url: fields.

To omit a field, simply do not have the line present, empty lines and fields (e.g. "tags:" followed by whitespace) will be ignored.

Theming

Two themes are provided: hyde, the default, and readable (based on bootswatch readable).

A guide to creating themes for coleslaw lives here.