CraBlog

This is a simple command-line tool to assist with writing blogs.

CraBlog lets you write blogposts in MarkDown, a simple markup language used all over the internet. From there, it lets you use a single command to transform those MarkDown files into an HTML file (with templating provided by Minijinja) and into an Atom feed.

Getting Started

First, initialize a directory using crablog init.

$ crablog init --author "Your Name Here"

This will create a crablog.toml file, which will contain configuration options and allow you to customize your feeds.

To create a post, first write up a simple markdown file:

# My First Blogpost!
This is my first blogpost using CraBlog!

Then, use crablog post to render this markdown file into an HTML file, and add it to your Atom feed.

$ crablog post --md my_first_blogpost.md --title "My First Blogpost!" --feed my_feed

FAQ

Q: Aren't there tools to do this already?

A: Theoretically yes, but making a custom one allowed me to tailor it to my specific needs.

Q: What is Minijinja, and why does CraBlog use it?

A: Minijinja is a templating language, meaning you can use it to modify a text file with dynamically-loaded data. There are several templating languages available for Rust, but Minijinja was picked for a few reasons:

• Few dependencies, meaning faster compilation time
• Nearly identical to jinja2, a popular Python templating language
• Unlike several Rust-based templating language, the templating occurs at runtime, so users can write their own templates
• Relatively fast execution speed