a command-line based blogging platform running on tilde.town
ttbp stands for “tilde.town blogging platform”, the original working name for
this project.
ttbp runs from the command line, providing a hub for writing personal blog
posts and reading posts written by other users of tilde.town. it’s a little bit
like livejournal or dreamwidth or tumblr. you can opt to publish your posts to
a public html file hosted on your tilde page, or keep all your entries private
to the tilde.town server.
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.
no coding or html experience is necessary to get started. just log in to your tilde.town account and enter:
~endorphant/bin/ttbp
ttbp will ask you a few questions to get you started. after that, writing and reading entries all happen within the program.
that’s it!
if you’re having trouble getting started, or run into program errors or strange behavior, please send internal tilde.town mail to ~endorphant and i’ll try to sort things out!
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 yes, this means you can post things out of date order by creating files with any date you want.
<!-- comments --> to have them show up
in the feed but not render in a browser (but people can still read
them with view-source)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.
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.
alias ttbp="~endorphant/bin/ttbp" to your .bash_aliases for fewer keystrokesalias ttbp-beta="~endorphant/bin/ttbp-beta")these are a few ideas being kicked around, or under active development:
(this section is only relevant if you plan on forking the repo and running an instance of this yourself)
if you’re interested in helping with the code, please drop me some tildemail!
unsolicited pull requests for bug-swatting are greatly appreciated.