./blog.sh

Writing doesn't arrive evenly. You get an evening where three posts want out, then nothing for a week. Publishing them the way they were written means three posts in one night and silence afterwards — which is a worse blog than the same three posts spread across three mornings.

So a site can now say when it usually publishes:

publishing:
  slots:
    - "mon 09:30"
    - "wed 09:30"
    - "fri 09:30"

Or, if you write more than that, a single "daily 09:00".

With that in the config, scheduling a draft offers you the next slot no other scheduled post already occupies. Three drafts written in one evening are offered Monday, Wednesday and Friday, in that order, without you counting days.

It only ever offers

This is the part I care about most, because a queue that takes decisions away from you is a queue you fight.

A photo in a post is a bare filename in an image line. It always has been:

![A view from the window](window.jpg)

So a file attached to a post is the same line without the exclamation mark:

[Reading notes, 2025](reading-notes.pdf)

A whole line that is nothing but a link, pointing at a bare filename with a known extension, is an attachment. It gets staged through incoming/ like a photo, stored next to the post like a photo, and it never leaves your site.

A line with a URL in it stays what it has always been: a link. The difference is the bare filename — the same rule photos already follow, so there's nothing new to learn.

Rendered as a card, not a link

An attachment renders as a card carrying the label, the extension and the size. The size is there because a download deserves to say what it costs before you commit to it — a 40 MB PDF on a phone on mobile data is a different proposition from a 200 kB one, and the reader should get to make that call.

A blog's front page is the only page that's a statement. Everything else is chronology doing its job.

So pinned: true in a published post's header now holds a copy of it at the top of the first listing page. That's the whole feature, and the interesting part is everywhere it deliberately doesn't apply.

Only the front page

Type listings, tag listings, the RSS feed and the sitemap stay strictly chronological. A pin is a claim about what a visitor should read first, not a rewrite of when things were written. Someone subscribed to the feed gets posts in the order they happened, and a pinned post doesn't jump their queue every time it's toggled.

What happens as it ages

While the post is still recent enough to sit on page 1 by date, it appears exactly once — pinning it doesn't print it twice on the same screen. Once it has aged onto page 2, it appears in both places: at the top of page 1, and in its own chronological spot on page 2.

./blog.sh 1.1 is out.

Pin a post to the top. Schedule into publishing slots that queue instead of colliding. Attach files as download cards. Rename a slug without breaking a link — the old URL redirects forever. One dialogue for everything you can do to a post.

And deploy guards that measure the build against the build, so a failed upload can't quietly switch them off.

./blog.sh 1.0.1 is out — eighteen fixes, none of them reported by a user.

They came out of an independent verification pass over the release: a failed write could leave a post without a file, one bad post could stop the whole build, a missing media file could delete the copy that was already live.

There's now a CHANGELOG a clone can read, and ./blog.sh version tells you what you're running.

./blog.sh 1.0 is out.

A blog engine that's a folder and a shell script. Ruby stdlib and bash — no database, no gems, no admin. Comments live on the Fediverse. Eight importers, so your Tumblr and Twitter archives have somewhere to go. MIT licensed.

The site you're reading is the engine running itself.

In 2012 I posted a photo to Instagram. The link still works. The photo doesn't.

If you kept a blog anywhere between 2010 and now, you know the drill. The platform got acquired, or pivoted, or "sunset some legacy infrastructure", and the images you embedded from their CDN quietly turned into grey rectangles. My personal archive goes back fourteen years across Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon and a couple of other places — and a depressing number of its images now live at addresses that answer with nothing at all.

Here's what I mean, from my own archive. On February 22, 2012, I published a blog post called #53: Messengers of Spring? and embedded its photo straight from Instagram's CDN, the way everyone did back then. This is that link today:

Petr

I need a dialogue in a blog post.

./blog.sh

Write it in a chat fence. Name, colon, line.

Petr

That's it?

./blog.sh

A line without a colon continues the one above it.

Petr

And Markdown inside?

./blog.sh

Works. Bold, links, code — the usual.

Petr

Every other engine wants a plugin for this.

./blog.sh

Every other engine wants a plugin for tables, too.

The source of that exchange is exactly what you just read — speaker's name, a colon, the line:

Petr: I need a dialogue in a blog post.
./blog.sh: Write it in a chat fence. Name, colon, line.
Petr: That's it?

Wrap those lines in a code fence tagged chat and you're done.

You just read the feature. That's the whole documentation.

Thirty-eight seconds, recorded on a phone, no edit. The written version is below if you'd rather read.

There are hundreds of static site generators. I wrote another one anyway, and the reasons fit in less than a minute.

My posts lived on big platforms for fourteen years. Some of those platforms changed the rules. Some just disappeared. I spend my whole day in a terminal, so I wanted to write my blog there too. And a small personal blog does not need a database — files are enough.

So: posts are files, the site is a build, and comments live on the Fediverse. That's the whole idea.

There is not a single colour value in this site's stylesheet.

Every colour you're looking at right now — background, text, links, the navigation, the little tag pills — comes from seven keys in config/site.yml. The build compiles them into a colors.css file, and site.css just uses the variables. Change seven lines, rebuild, and the site is someone else entirely.

Here's a complete light-mode palette:

colors:
  light:
    bg: "#f5f8fa"
    text: "#444a5a"
    meta_text: "#657784"
    accent: "#1da1f2"
    nav_bg: "#eaf5fd"
    border: "#e1e8ed"
    pill_bg: "#d6ecfc"

And here's the same homepage in five palettes — nothing changed between these shots except seven lines of YAML and a rebuild: