Blogen is a static site/blog generator. Everything it can do, is generate a range of pages and blog posts out of text files marked up in markdown.

It is based on Flask and Frozen-Flask. It makes also use of Flask-FlatPages Flask-Themes and Flask-Script.

It was inspired by Nicolas's blog post and was written and is maintained by Alexander Jung-Loddenkemper.

Download blogen as a zip and unzip it or clone the git repository:

git clone git://github.com/alexex/blogen.git

Then do the following:

cd blogen
python blogen.py setup

That's it already.

You should create a file blogen.cfg in the app's root. So far there are only two settings available, of which none is necessary but one recommended:

TITLE = "Your site's title." # this is recommended
THEME = "<ID>" # this defaults to the default bootstrap theme.
PER_PAGE = <NUM> # optional, the default is 5
PAGESLUG = '<SLUG>' # optional, customize the slug for pages to your likings, see the Slugs section for more info on available parameters
POSTSLUG = '<SLUG>' # optional, customize the slug for posts to your likings, see the Slugs section for more info on available parameters
DISQUS='<SHORTNAME>' # optional, disqus support, just enter your disqus shortname here
ANALYTICS='<ID>' # optional, analytics support, just enter your analytics ID here
SOCIAL=[('<Name>', '<URL>')] # optional, will create a social dropdown if given. put a number of tuples you like
MENU=[('<Name>', '<URL>')]  # optional, add custom entries to the menu.
DATETIME='<FORMATSTRING>' # optional, how dates should be looking like on your blog, check out http://docs.python.org/library/datetime.html#strftime-strptime-behavior for further information

%title% - title of your post/page
%path% - path of the file
%year% - year of the post
%month% - month of the post
%day% - day of the post
%hour% - hour of the post
%minute% - minute of the post 

For all time dependent vars applies the fact, that of no date is given the file modification date is used.

Create files that end with .md in pages if you want pages and posts in posts. The part before the .md will also be the url of you page/post for now. Configuration is done via YAML. Create at least a title-tag in the beginning of the file. For now title, date, tags and slug are supported. There will be more supported tags in the future.

A minimal example would look like this:

title: Title of the post or page

text

A more advanced example would like this:

title: Title of the post or page
date: 2012-06-18 18:30
tags: [we, are, tags, "many tags"]
slug: "i/am/a/custom-url"

Just run:

python blogen.py build

I personally push my blog via git and have a deploy hook that executes blogen.py, but you can of course deploy how ever you want. Rsync might be a nice idea, for example.

Blogen makes us of jinja2, just copy the default-theme from themes/ and adapt/rewrite it to your needs. Set THEME in your blogen.cnf to the id of your theme.