Dragon, the Drive Blog Engine

I decided to rebuild my personal website. In doing so, I built a blog engine that I call Dragon.

All posts are written in Google Drive (If you're curious about what generated this post, click here).

When I log in, the blog checks my blog folder for new posts and updates the blog with those posts. It's using a Markdown engine, making it super easy for me to write and edit posts. I'm still getting used to Dragon myself, but I'm liking it so far.

An introduction

I've tried blog engines like Wordpress, but was never completely satisfied.

I have always been frustrated with blogging for a few small (yet key) issues:

With Wordpress, I always had difficulty in editing posts
Signing in with WP Admin page using my WP account was annoying
I had difficulty controlling the style of the page, often relying on templates.
I wanted full control over each posts' HTML and a full understanding of the inner workings of the engine
Wordpress required me to find a Linux server and put on a sysadmin hat just to get running.

I wanted a certain set of features for my blog engine:

It needed to be easy to create new posts. (Google Drive made the most sense).
I also wanted full control of the blog engine (hosting on AppEngine)
I also didn't want to be limited by the HTML output for Google Drive docs when exported (Markdown).

Also, something I've always been frustrated by as a coder is the inability to nicely add code into a Google doc. Using Markdown, I could solve this problem:

def add(x,y):
  return x + y

How it works

I write my posts entirely in Google Drive, using Markdown. The posts live under a folder for my blog posts.

During the editing process, I visit my own "admin panel" at rm -rf /. Using my Google authentication, it polls the blog folder for unadded posts and updates any new or unpublished posts.


The admin panel where I manage new posts

Finally, when I'm happy with the post, I hit "publish." The published posts come with a comment section from Disqus and with style that I've added for all posts on the site.

Things I'm adjusting to

I'm still learning the subtleties of Markdown (i.e. still using <br /> to create blank lines; Python-Markdown's nl2br package doesn't seem to cut it).
Pulling from Drive to AppEngine is not always instantaneous (that is, for new changes, it takes some time before AppEngine can see the most recent version).

Special thanks

Special thanks to the awesome technology that helped me build this engine:

If you'd like to checkout the source, please check out https://github.com/akivab/dragon