That’s it!

First, you will obviously need Ruby 2.1 or newer.

You will need to install Kramdown and plist first:

Then build and install this gem:

Basically, you need to use the etblog command-line utility to create and build blogs.

First, create a directory for your blog:

Now run etblog init to initialize the blog:

After that, you should get this directory tree:

The blog.plist file is the configuration file of your blog. There, you can specify:

• Your name and the name of your blog

• The description of your blog

• Links to various posts and sites that the user will see on the sidebar

Open it in your favorite text editor and change the name of your blog, specify your real name and change the description.

If you would like to change the folder where the compiled HTML files should be placed, change the Static option too.

Adding links is pretty easy. As the key, you specify the title of the link and as the value, you specify the href location of the link. Example (add this after <dict>):

After that, save the plist file and add some blog posts.

Adding blog posts is pretty easy too. You just create a markdown file with the post- prefix and write your blog in pure markdown. No need to specify the date or anything like that manually!

For example, let’s create a hello world post. The file name of our post should be post-helloworld.md. We just create that file near the blog.plist file and add some contents into it:

Example contents:

Now compile the blog:

In the static folder (if you did not change the value of the Static key in the plist file), you should find:

Now open the static/index.html file to see your blog and then (if you like it) publish it to your server and enjoy!

Basically, a theme is a single HTML page with external dependencies only that contains these tags that are later substituted by the ETBlog preprocessor:

• @{post} - mandatory tag. Will be substituted with the title and the contents of the post. If you are building a Bootstrap-based ETBlog theme, put this tag inside <div class="container">.

• @{title} - mandatory tag. Will be substituted with the name of the blog. If you are building a Bootstrap-based theme, put it in the navbar.

• @{description} - optional tag. Will be substituted with the description of the blog.

• @{links} - optional tag. Will be substituted with the links specified in blog.plist. If you are building a Bootstrap-based theme, put it in the navbar.