Multiblog

This is a quasi-static blog engine supporting rendering in multiple languages based on the user agent language.

It is currently not generic enough to be used for anything other than a personal blog, but the goal is to fully separate the appearance control from the engine.

Usage

Running multiblog will start an HTTP server for the content found under the current directory. The following environment variables can be given:

• PORT - the port to listen on, default 8000.
• SITE_URL - the site URL used for the links, default http://localhost:8000.
• CONTENT_DIRECTORY - the directory to look for content in instead.

Content

There are two types of content to display: articles and metas. Articles have a publication date, and form the main stream of the blog. Metas are pages which don't have a date, and are typically acessible from the header/footer menu.

All content is written in Markdown and is converted into HTML when rendering. Both articles and metas have multiple language versions in separate Markdown files in the same directory.

Articles directories are named yyyy-mm-dd-slug, where yyyy-mm-dd is the publication date of the article and slug is unique, within a day, article identifier that will be used in the URL.

Metas are stored in meta directory, and their directory names are taken directly to be their slugs.

Individual Markdown files inside the directories are named after their content language code, for example, en.md.

Metas support rendering as slideshows via remark. To switch a meta to presentation mode, add layout: presentation to options.yaml in the meta directory.

Metas can be exported as PDF or DOCX by adding .pdf or .docx to the URL. To control the exported file name, add exportSlug: AnotherName to options.yaml in the meta directory.

Some elements of the blog other than content itself must also be translated. The translations use the file strings.yaml which must contain hashes of the following structure: string - language - translation.

The sidebar links are specified in links.yaml. They can point either to metas or to any external address.

Examples

All the examples assume https://blog.example.com/ to be the root address of the blog.

Articles

This article spread across two files for two languages will be displayed under the URL https://blog.example.com/2015/01/03/myarticle:

2015-01-03-myarticle/en.md:

# My article

This is the article content in English.

2015-01-03-myarticle/zh.md:

# 我的文章

这是该文章的中文内容。

Metas

This is an example of a meta that will be displayed under https://blog.example.com/about:

meta/about/en.md

# About the blog

This is the site introduction in English.

meta/about/zh.md

# 关于博客

这是该网站的中文介绍。

Strings

This is an example of string translation file, strings.yaml:

home:
  en: Home
  zh: 首页

Links

An example of links file, links.yaml:

- page: about
- url: https://www.yandex.ru
  text:
    en: Yandex
    ru: Яндекс
- url: https://www.github.com
  text: GitHub