Persona

Persona is a minimal personal content manager. It is designed for geeks: you need to have Ruby and Git installed in your machine, and know how to use it. However, you don't need to be a Ruby developer.

Principles:

it's for geeks
it's minimal (150 lines of code at the moment)
leverage cloud services and infrastructure
lets you create a website for free (no hosting fees)

In this stage it's a work in progress, without much documentation.

Prerequisites

You need to have

Ruby (1.8.7 or 1.9.2)
RubyGems
git
a Rack compatible HTTP Server

installed on your machine.

If you don't have a Rack server, or you don't know what is it, after you have installed Ruby and RubyGems just type

$ gem install thin

Notice: depending on your installation, you might see some problem with permissions while executing the previous command. In this case, try

$ sudo gem install thin

Create your site

$ gem install persona
$ persona create_site myblog
$ cd myblog

done.

Test your website

From the 'myblog' folder, start your Rack server. If you installed thin, type

$ thin start

and open your browser to localhost:3000

Add contents

Pages and blog posts are (at the moment, will likely change soon) specified in HTML-ish files inside the folders /contents/pages and /contents/posts. Have a look at the sample provided in your website.

Every file specifies in the first 3 rows some metadata (title, author and date) and, after a blank line, the HTML content of the page/post.

To add a new page, just create another .txt file in the /contents/page folder. If the file is called myfile.txt, it will immediately be visible at http://localhost:3000/pages/myfile

To add a new blog post, create a .txt file with this naming convention: ---<post_title>.txt The blog post will be immediately visible under http://localhost:3000/year/month/date/post_title

Customize

The folders public views config contain files you can customize. Have a look!

What to do next

A few things you might want to do next

open a github account and project, and upload your website there
open a Heroku account, and deploy your website there

Note that, since your website doesn't use a database, you can use the Heroku free plan!

(that's it for now, will post more details soon)

persona