Series./blog.sh v1.9⁷

./blog.sh 1.9 is out — release on GitHub.

The release about publishing in more than one language. Name them in site.locales, and a post keeps one date, one set of tags and one series, with a text per language written by ./blog.sh translate. The site's own language keeps the root, every other one gets its own, and one rebuild makes all of them. The banner, menu, footer and tags speak each language too; a post nobody has translated still shows, linking to the one copy that exists. This very site has been running in English and Czech since the release was a draft.

Around it, the first hour: two people installed 1.9 from nothing and upgraded a copy of a 6,600-post site, doing only what the docs said, and everything they tripped over is fixed. Esc never does anything, the setup speaks your language from its first screen and will not take the template's example as your site's name, a draft's properties show where to read it — with a QR code for the phone — and doctor --online now asks the deploy target what stands in its root that the site does not put there.

Somebody writes in Czech, and some of the people who would read it don't read Czech. The usual answer is a second blog — a second archive, a second set of tags, a second feed — and within a year the two have drifted apart: a post fixed in one and not the other, a tag renamed on one side, a reader who switches languages and lands somewhere that no longer matches. blog.sh 1.9 gives a different answer: one site, and the other language beside it.

Somebody translates their posts, opens the Czech half of the site — and the menu still says Writing, the footer still says Links, and every tag on every pill is the English word. The posts were only ever half of what a reader reads. The rest is what the site says about itself, and in 1.9 that has a language too.

Somebody moves a blog off WordPress onto blog.sh and keeps the same hosting, the same directory, the same address. The build is ready, the first deploy goes through without an error — and the front page is still the old one. Nothing went wrong in the upload. The old site was simply never taken away, and the host prefers it.

A shared hosting plan often comes with a directory, an FTP login and nothing else — no SSH, no rsync, no git. That has been enough for blog.sh all along; the docs just never said so until 1.9. The way there is the rclone backend, because rclone speaks FTP as one of its many remotes.

Sending a post from an iPhone took two shortcuts until 1.9: one to take the files from the share sheet, one to open the SSH connection. Written on a train walked through both. It is one shortcut now, imported rather than built, and it runs on a Mac as well.

Five posts have covered what 1.9 is about: a post in two languages, the site in the language of the page, what stands in a deploy target before the first deploy, a host that only speaks FTP and one phone shortcut instead of two. This one is the rest, in the order an operator meets it. Most of it came from two people who set 1.9 up from nothing and upgraded a copy of a 6,600-post site, doing only what the docs said.