As easy as blogging can get. Set it up in three steps, get a handful of useful features and a nice blog.

No complicated extras, just a straightforward blog.

• Easy to use: Just put Markdown files in a folder and Blogo will take care of the rest.
• Light: Blogo is light on resources, and light on your eyes:
  • No JS, no cookies.
  • Zero-clutter UI, focus on what matters.
  • Tiny ~10MB Docker image.
  • No database, just files.
  • Fast cache for popular posts.
• Markdown: Write your posts in Markdown.
  • Github Flavored Markdown is supported.
  • Syntax Highlighting using chroma
  • YAML Metadata for posts info.
• Feeds: RSS, Atom and JSON feeds!
• Raw endpoint: Add /raw to any article link to get the raw markdown!
• About page: Easily create an About page for your blog. Just name a file about.md and that's it.
• Themes: You can create your own themes, or use one of the 23 available themes.
• Nostr: Optionally publish your posts to Nostr for backing them up and getting more reach.
  • Set your own key, or let Blogo generate one for you.
  • Set your own relay list, or use the default list.
• Auto-reload: When a new post is added, or changed, blogo automatically reloads it.
• SEO/SSNN Optimized: Blogo is optimized for SEO, it contains all necessary meta tags and social sharing tags!
• No JS: Blogo doesn't use any JavaScript, so it's widely compatible and secure.
• CLI Tool: A simple CLI tool will allow you to create new post templates.

The easiest way to self-host Blogo is by using Docker.

1. Create the docker-compose.yml:

services:
  blogo:
    image: pluja/blogo:v3
    container_name: blogo
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./articles:/blogo/articles
      - ./blogo.yml:/blogo/blogo.yml
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:1337:1337"

2. Get and edit the config file:

wget -O blogo.yml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluja/blogo/refs/heads/v3/example.blogo.yml

All blogo.yml variables can be set as environment variables. Check out Configuration section.

3. Run blogo:

docker compose up -d

Blogo is now available at http://localhost:1337. You can now create your first article.

You can either configure blogo using the blogo.yml file or env variables. The config file will be expected to be in either the same path as the exectuable (./blogo.yml), in /blogo/blogo.yml or in $HOME/.blogo/blogo.yml.

Using Blogo is pretty simple. Once you have blogo running, you can create new articles by just running blogo new my-post-slug, where my-post-slug is the slug of the post (used in the url). This will create a new template in the articles folder. Edit that file with your favorite text editor. Once done, save it and Blogo will take care of the rest (yes, it auto-reloads).

If you're on docker, you can run docker exec -it blogo blogo new my-post-slug to create a new post.

Articles in Blogo use YAML metadata. The metadata is located at the top of the file, between --- and ---.

Here's a list of the available metadata fields:

• Title: The title of the post. This will also be used as the title for sharing and SEO.
• Author: The author of the post.
• Summary: The summary of the post. This is used in the index page. This will also be used as the description for sharing and SEO.
• Image: The image of the post. This is used as the post thumbnail / header image. This will also be used as the thumbnail when sharing.
• Tags: The tags of the post. Must be a list of strings. This will also be used as the keywords for SEO.
• Date: The date of the post. Must be in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
• Draft: Whether the post is a draft or not. Must be true or false.
• Layout: The layout of the post. For now, only post is available.
• Nostr: If set to a falsey value (false, 0...) it will disable the posting of that article to Nostr even if Nostr publishing is enabled.

Example metadata, it must be at the top of the .md file:

---
Author: John Doe
Date: 2023-04-28 17:54
Draft: false
Image: https://picsum.photos/1920/1080
Summary: In the grand tapestry of human history, few periods have been as transformative or as rapidly evolving as the present.
Tags:
    - some
    - tags
Title: Example Post
---

To create an about page, just create a file called about.md in the articles folder. Blogo will automatically detect it and create a link to it in the navbar.

To add your own static content, you can just bind-mount any folder to /app/static/your-folder.

For example if you are using docker compose, you can add:

volumes:
    - ./img:/blogo/frontend/static/img

Then you can just use /static/img/your-image.jpg in the markdown to add an image:

![My image](/static/img/your-image.jpg)

The /app/static folder contains the css styles needed for styling Blogo. For this, it is recommended to always create subfolders with bind mounts inside.

If you set the nostr.publish variable in the blogo.yml file to true, Blogo will publish your posts to Nostr. By default, Blogo will generate an ephemeral key (changes on every restart) and use a default relay list.

You can change either of these defaults by setting any of these variables in the blogo.yml file:

• nostr.nsec - expects a valid nsec key. If you set this key, your posts will be always published for the same key, even on restarts.
  • You can generate a new Nostr key pair using blogo -nkeys.
• nostr.relays - expects a yaml list of relays (with protocol); eg. ["wss://relay1.com","wss://relay2.net"].

You can avoid publishing a particular post to Nostr by setting the Nostr metadata field in the post to false or 0.

Posts are published to Nostr as Long-Form events following the definition in NIP-33.

You can add analytics to your blog by setting the analytics variable in the blogo.yml file to your analytics script. Blogo will automatically add it to the bottom of the page. Make sure to put it all in a single line!

analytics: '<script defer src="https://my.analytics.site/script.js"></script>'

You can customize the look and feel of your blog by editing the templates and CSS.

The easiest way to customize your Blogo, is to create a new theme. For this, you can add a new .css file to the static/css/themes/ folder with the contents:

:root {
    --blogo-background: rgb(26, 26, 28);
    --blogo-primary: #4d79bf;
    --blogo-primary-emphasis: #567d98;
    --blogo-primary-dark: #141626;
    --blogo-primary-light: #bbbdc4;
    --blogo-text: #c8c7c1;
    --blogo-text-select: #353839;
    --blogo-text-fade: rgb(81, 81, 87);
    --blogo-text-title: rgb(206, 205, 195);
}

And customize the colors from there. If you're in docker, you can create a volume like:

volumes:
    - /path/to/mytheme.css:/blogo/static/css/themes/mytheme.css

Then set mytheme as the value in theme on your blogo.yml config file.

Simply replace the frontend/static/assets/favicon.webp and frontend/static/assets/banner.webp files. They must be named as favicon.webp and banner.webp. If you're on Docker, you can bind files like:

volumes:
    - ./path/to/my/favicon.web:/blogo/frontend/static/assets/favicon.webp
    - ./path/to/my/banner.web:/blogo/frontend/static/assets/banner.webp

The templates are located in the src/frontend/templates folder.

• blogo.site
• blog.kycnot.me
• blog.kyun.host