a command-line based blogging platform running on tilde.town

ttbp stands for “tilde.town blogging platform”, the original working name for this project.

to use, run ~endorphant/bin/ttbp while logged in to tilde.town

you can also try ~endorphant/bin/ttbp-beta for a more colorful, but potentially volatile experience; i sometimes announce in irc or on twitter when i’m testing a new feature.

writing entries

entries are recorded as plaintext files in your ~/.ttbp/entries directory. you can edit them there directly, or fix old entries, or delete entries.

warning: changing old entries might cause strange things to happen with timestamps. the main program looks at the filename first for setting the date, then the last modified time to sort recent posts. it expects YYYMMDD.txt as the filename; anything else won’t show up as a valid entry. yes, this means you can post things out of date order by creating files with any date you want.

general entry-writing notes

• you can use markdown
• you can use html
• you can also put things between <!-- comments --> to have them show up in the feed but not render in a browser (but people can still read them with view-source)

privacy

when you start your ttbp, you have the option of publishing or not publishing your blog.

if you opt to publish, the program creates a directory ~/.ttbp/www where it stores all html files it generates, and symlinks this from your ~/public_html with your chosen blog directory. your blog will also be listed on the main ttbp page.

if you opt to not publish, your entires will never be accessible from outside of the tilde.town network; other tilde.town users will still be able to read your entries through the ttbp interface, or by directly accessing your ~/.ttbp/entries directory.

if you want to further protect your entries, you can chmod 700 your entries directory.

changing your page layout

you can modify how your blog looks by editing the stylesheet or header and footer files. the program sets you up with basic default. if you break your page somehow, you can force the program to regenerate your configuration by deleting your ~/.ttbp directory entirely. you might want to back up your ~/.ttbp/entries directory before you do this.

• to modify your stylesheet, edit your ~/.ttbp/config/style.css
  • (future feature: having multiple stylesheets you can select)
• to modify the page header, edit your ~/.ttbp/config/header.txt
  • you might note that there’s a place marked off in the default header where you can safely put custom HTML elements!
• to modify the page footer, edit your ~/.ttbp/config/footer.txt

general tips/troubleshooting

• add alias ttbp="~endorphant/bin/ttbp" to your .bash_aliases for fewer keystrokes
• (similarly, alias ttbp-beta="~endorphant/bin/ttbp-beta")
• if the date looks like it’s ahead or behind, it’s because you haven’t set your local timezone yet. here are some http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-set-tz-environment-variable/.

future features

these are a few ideas being kicked around, or under active development:

• better entry privacy/publish control options
• stylesheet/theme selector
• responding to entries
• paginated list view
• better entry display within ttbp