"Camel" is a blogging platform written in Node.js. It is designed to be fast, simple, and lean.

More specifically, the design goals were:

• Easy posting using Markdown
• Basic metadata, stored in each file
• Basic templating, with a site header/footer and post header stored separately from content
• Extremely quick performance, by caching rendered HTML output
• Support RSS

Thus, Camel is neither a static blogging platform nor a truly dynamic one. It is a little from column A, and a little from column B. The first time a post is loaded, it is rendered by converting from Markdown to HTML, and then postpocessed by adding headers & footer, as well as making metadata replacements. Upon a completed render, the resultant HTML is stored and used from that point forward.

1. Install Node & NPM
2. Clone the repository
3. Get all the dependencies using NPM: npm install
4. node ./camel.js

• There's a group of "statics" near the top of the file
• The parameters in the /rss route will need to be modified.
• It's worth noting there are some Handlebars templates in use:
  • index.md
    • @@ DayTemplate - used to render a day
    • @@ ArticlePartial – used to render a single article in a day
    • @@ FooterTemplate - used to render pagination
  • postHeader.html - Placed on every post between the site header and post content

To use Camel, the following files are required:

Root
  +-- camel.js
  |   Application entry point
  +-- package.json
  |   Node package file
  +-- templates/
  |     +-- defaultTags.html
  |     |   Site-level default tags, such as the site title
  |     +-- header.html
  |     |   Site header (top of every page)
  |     +-- footer.html
  |     |   Site footer (bottom of every page)
  |     `-- postHeader.html
  |         Post header (top of every post, after the site header. Handlebars template.)
  +-- public/
  |     `-- Any static files, such as non-blog pages/images/css/javascript/etc.
  `-- posts/
      All the pages & posts are here. Pages in the root, posts ordered by day. For example:
        +-- index.md
        |   Root file; note that DayTemplate, ArticlePartial, and FooterTemplate are
        |   all Handlebars templates
        +-- about.md
        |   Sample about page
        +-- 2014/
        |   Year
        |     +-- 4/
        |     |   Month
        |     |   +-- 29/
        |     |   |   Day
        |     |   |    `-- some-blog-post.md
        |     |   `-- 30/
        |     |        +-- some-other-post.md
        |     |        `-- yet-another-post.md
        |     `-- 5/
        |         `-- 1/
        |             `-- newest-blog-post.md
        `-- etc.

For each post, metadata is specified at the top, and can be leveraged in the body. For example:

@@ Title=Test Post
@@ Date=2014-05 17:50

This is a *test post* entitled "@@Title@@".

The title and date are required. Any other metadata is optional.

There are a couple of quirks, which don't bother me, but may bother you.

When a new post is created, you'll want to restart the app in order to clear the caches. There is a commented out route /tosscache that will also do this job, if you choose to enable it.

There is no mechanism within Camel for transporting a post to the posts/ directory. It is assumed that delivery will happen by way of a git push or equivalent. That is, for example, how it would work when run on Heroku.

Camel uses a semi-peculiar pagination model which is being referred to as "loose pagination". Partly due to laziness, and partly because it seems better, pagination isn't strict. Rather than always cutting off a page afer N posts, instead, pagination is handled differently.

Starting with the most recent day's posts, all the posts in that day are added to a logical page. Once that page contains 10 or more posts, that page is considered complete. The next page is then started.

Therefore, all the posts in a single day will always be on the same page. That, in turns, means that pages will have at least 10 posts, but possibly more. In fact, a single page could have quite a few more than 10 posts if, say, on one lucrative day there are 15 posts.

Pagingation is only necessary on the homepage, and page numbers are 1-based. Pages greater than 1 are loaded by passing the query string parameter p. For example, hostname/?p=3 for page 3.

Camel is functional, and is presently running www.caseyliss.com. However, there are a few things that can and/or should be improved:

• The year listing is not implemented. For example, /2014.
• There are a few places where things are repeated, and/or simply not as efficient as they should be.
• Need to investigate whether or not some cached data is repeated (efficiency not behavioral issue)
• RSS entries shouldn't include the post header.

Camel is MIT-Licensed.