I've just released the first version of my new blog engine -- powering this site! -- for public consumption. It's a super simple Python script, allowing for a huge amount of customization without so much as touching the actual blog engine.

This was built in response to Posterous' announcement to shut down, which I had been using for this blog previously.

How it works

At its heart is 92 lines of Python code which reads in entries from your blog directory, splits them into index pages, and runs everything through Mako templates that you provide.

This all enables a lot of flexibility and power, despite that it can fit on a single sheet of paper.

Example

You can see this blog on Github here: daeken/benjen

Next Steps

I'm hoping to package this nicely as a git post-receive hook, so that you can just push your blog to a repository and have it automatically rebuilt on the server. (Update: This is now done and documented in the README.)

Update #2: Benjen v1.1 is out with RSS support.
Update #3: Benjen v1.1.1 is out with some additional magic to support proper ordering of posts within a given day.
Update #4: Benjen v1.2 is out, switching to Markdown metadata for title/date, simplifying the code and making it more extensible for the future.

If anyone has other ideas, shoot me an email and let me know: [email protected]

Happy hacking,
- Cody Brocious (Daeken)