Blogging with Frog

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
—E.M. Forster

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• First use
• Creating new posts
• Customizations
  • .frogrc
  • page-template.html
  • post-template.html
  • bootstrap.css
• Miscellany
• Comments
• Publishing
• Closing remarks

Introduction

When publishing blog content to the web, most would rely on pre-fabricated services, that do most of the heavy lifting. However, there are instances when you want to have more control over your stuff. A good example of which are the constraints that providers enforce. Another is the presence of ads, or the use of freemium services, i.e., things can be done, only up to a certain visible limit.

One may argue that all they need is a platform to blog with, and that they don’t need the extra flexibility. While that is fine, some of us, including me, want to be free from these shackles. I don’t want ads on my site. I don’t want surprise censorship. I want freedom. Now, if you’re like me, then read on.

When I was looking for tools to create this blog, I became dissatisfied with most of the mainstream options. Some are the just too difficult to setup, while some are lacking in features. I became frustrated because each end of the spectrum forces me to use something that is extremely mediocre in at least one critical aspect. Fortunately, I found Frog, via a suggestion on #racket.

Frog, in layman’s terms, is a site creator, that is very easy to use, configure, and customize. Whatever you write, will appear on your blog—you get what you expect. There are no weird terms of use, nor arbitrary limits, nor coercion—it’s very close to full control, at the tip of your fingertips.

Frog operates somewhere in the middle of the spectrum:

Raw Content → Frog → HTML

Where raw content is either Markdown, Scribble, or HTML source files, or a combination of all. Frog takes in those input files, and it outputs nice HTML that you can upload to your web server. Easy? No, it’s even easier that it sounds.

Installation

In the succeeding sections, let’s presume that your username is vakelo, and your home directory is /home/vakelo/.

To install Frog, you need to install Racket, first. Chances are, your package manager already has it.

Nix:

$ nix-env -i racket

APT:

$ sudo apt-get install racket

In the unlikely event that it can’t be installed using your package manager, go to racket-lang.org/download/ , then follow the instructions from there.

Next, you need to install Frog.

$ raco pkg install frog

After which, you’ll get the raco frog command. Let’s display its help options:

$ raco frog -h

First use

Sweet. Now that you have Frog installed, let’s get rolling. To create your first Frog-powered website, you’ll create a project directory first:

$ mkdir blog
$ cd blog

You’ll then fire the spark plug, to initialize the site repository:

$ raco frog --init

You’ll see a message saying that your website is ready. Let’s follow the suggested command:

$ raco frog -bp

What that command does is that it builds the HTML files from the sample source files created with the ‑‑init switch, then it runs a local web server, serving by default, the location http://localhost:3000.

Frog will then open a new browser tab, or window, pointing to that URL. The page that you’ll see contains the default site layout. When you’re OK with it, let’s go back to the terminal, and kill that process by hitting C-c.

Creating new posts

Creating a new article from scratch is another easy task:

$ raco frog -n "New Blog Post."

What it does is that it creates a Markdown file, relative to the current directory, with the format _src/posts/YYYY-MM-DD-post-title.md. With the command above, the absolute path would be similar to:

/home/vakelo/blog/_src/posts/2014-02-21-new-blog-post.md

Let’s edit that file, and see how it looks like:

$ emacs _src/posts/2014-02-21-new-blog-post.md

    Title: New Blog Post
    Date: 2014-02-21T18:53:42
    Tags: DRAFT

_Replace this with your post text. Add one or more
comma-separated Tags above. The special tag `DRAFT`
will prevent the post from being published._

<!-- more -->

Bear in mind that this file, was created for you, by the command raco frog -n .... The first three lines contains metadata about your post. They’re the post title, date of creation, and tags, respectively. The date was picked up from the the -n switch that was issued, earlier. The Tags field, contains a comma-separated list of words, that Frog would later identify the post with. When the case-sensitive tag DRAFT is used, the file will be skipped during the build phase.

Four spaces must be prefixed, prior, to those three lines, followed by an empty line. The rest will be the actual article content, in Markdown format. When a line by its own contain just the text <!– more –>, that line will be replaced by a hyperlink in the final HTML form, that will point to the rest of the article. That means, all text, after the <!– more –> line will not appear in the blog index, but will appear in the link for the whole post.

Let’s say you change that file to look something like the following:

    Title: New Blog Post
    Date: 2014-02-21T18:53:42
    Tags: arts, history

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Donec
odio. Quisque volutpat mattis eros. Nullam malesuada erat ut
turpis. Suspendisse urna nibh, viverra non, semper suscipit,
posuere a, pede.

<!-- more -->

Donec nec justo eget felis facilisis fermentum. Aliquam
porttitor mauris sit amet orci. Aenean dignissim pellentesque
felis.

Then, run the build command, again:

$ raco frog -bp

You now have two posts, as displayed in the index. To remove the auto-generated initial post, that was created by the command raco frog –init, earlier, run:

$ rm -f _src/posts/2012-01-01-a-2012-blog-post.md

Then, rebuild the files:

$ raco frog -bp

Customizations

By this time, you’re really itching to customize the site. Yep, that’s what you’re going to do in this section.

At the basic level, there are three files that you are going to modify, to make your initial changes:

• .frogrc
• _src/page-template.html
• _src/post-template.html
• css/bootstrap.css
• css/bootstrap.min.css

Let’s examine each of the files in the list, closer.

.frogrc

This file is where top-level customizations are made. Open the file .frogrc, located in the current directory:

$ emacs .frogrc

You’ll notice that there are more than a dozen parameters that can be tweaked. But for now, you’re only concerned about three parameters:

• scheme/host
• title
• author

scheme/host should contain the (sub)domain to which you’ll be publishing your work later. title is the name of your blog. author is your name.

page-template.html

This file contains the common content, across all types of pages, whether they are blog or non-blog posts. Open the file _src/page-template.html, located in the current directory:

$ emacs _src/page-template.html

You’ll see an even bigger file, compared to .frogrc. This is an special HTML file, that contains Racket, and Frog-specific code. It will be used as a basis for all pages that you’ll create. There are plenty of parameters here, but you’ll just tweak some that are most usable to you, at the moment. To make it easier, I’ll just list down the items to search and replace for:

• The Unknown Blogger
• My Blog Brand
• Welcome
• Your legal notice here

It should be self-evident what you should replace them with.

post-template.html

Similar to page-template.html, but this file contains content that will only appear with blog posts. It is also perhaps the easiest file to modify. Let’s open it:

$ emacs _src/post-template.html

For now, you only need to modify the text shortname. It is the identifier that links the comments section of your blog posts, to a Disqus account. More about this will be discussed in the section Comments.

bootstrap.css and bootstrap.min.css

These two files are responsible for what is commonly called as themes—it controls the look of the site. To change these files, let’s head over to https://bootswatch.com/, then let’s select a theme you like.

Let’s presume that you want to download the Cerulean theme. Click the dropdown box arrow, next to the download link, for that theme. Select and download both bootstrap.min.css and bootstrap.css. After which, copy them over to the css subdirectory css/.

$ cp ~/Downloads/bootstrap.*.css css/

Miscellany

When you created a new post earlier, you used the following command:

$ raco frog -n "New Blog Post"

That command, creates a Markdown source file. Frog, however, has another mode—Scribble. This mode lets you use a Scribble source file, instead. To create one, you’ll use the following command:

$ raco frog -N "New Blog Post"

With the command above, the absolute path would look like:

/home/vakelo/blog/_src/posts/2014-02-21-new-blog-post.scrbl

Again, let’s edit that file, and see how it looks like:

$ emacs _src/posts/2014-02-21-new-blog-post.scrbl

##lang scribble/manual

Title: New Blog Post
Date: 2014-02-21T18:53:42
Tags: DRAFT

Replace this with your post text. Add one or more
comma-separated Tags above. The special tag `DRAFT`
will prevent the post from being published.

<!-- more -->

We can see that the Markdown and Scribble files are mostly the same, except with the addition of the language specifier, #lang scribble/manual, and the absence of the prefix spaces for the metadata fields.

Comments

Frog makes use of Disqus to handle its comments. To use it, create an account at https://disqus.com/profile/signup/.

When you already have your account, go to https://disqus.com/admin/create/ to create a site, which will have an alias called a shortname. The shorname is what you’ll register with Disqus to uniquely identify your website.

So, if you chose, for example, foobar, as the shortname for the site, you may then access http://foobar.disqus.com to manage the comments for that site. The shortname mentioned here, is what you’ll use in the file _src/post-template.html, as discussed above.

To import comments, from an existing blog, to Disqus, go to https://import.disqus.com.

Publishing

To publish your work, upload the contents of the directory that Frog manages to your remote server. In this tutorial, it is the directory /home/vakelo/blog. If the current directory is blog/, and you want to send the files via rsync, the command would look like:

$ rsync -avz ./ remotehost:public_html

Replace public_html with the appropriate remote directory.

However, if you don’t have a remote host and you use Git, you can use the free hosting service of GitHub Pages. If you don’t have a GitHub account yet, you may go to GitHub to create one. To use, GitHub Pages, create a repository named USERNAME.github.io. So, if your username is vakelo, the repository that you need to create should be named vakelo.github.io.

To publish your work to GitHub Pages, you first need to add that remote repository:

$ git remote add origin git@github.com:vakelo/vakelo.github.io.git

Then you push the commits:

$ git push origin master

To view your website, go to vakelo.github.io.

Closing remarks

Frog is a viable and usable site creator. It is easy-to-use, highly configurable, flexible, and yes, open source. It gives control, back to the author. A good example of a Frog-powered blog can be found at https://ngnghm.github.io/.

Frog was created by Greg Hendershott. If you want to learn more about it, go here.

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