Philipp Küng

Guy behind @bitfondue

A Link-Blog with Octopress

During the last week well known bloggers have started turning off comments in a move to not having to care about sorting out SPAM and having more time for the actual writing. Matt Gemmell has written an excellent summary about this, for those of you interested.

While I’m not sure yet if I’ll ever do the same, I started wondering on how to realize something like a Link-Blog with Octopress. Turns out it’s pretty easy.

First modify the article.html inside source/_includes and exchange the lower <h1> part which is responsible for the page view title with an if-else clause.

<h1 class="entry-title">
  {% if page.ref_url %}
    <a class="reference" href="{{ page.ref_url }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
  {% else %}
    {% if site.titlecase %}
      {{ page.title | titlecase }}
    {% else %}
      {{ page.title }}
    {% endif %}
  {% endif %}
</h1>

Then continue with adding an if-else clause to the atom.xml file too. Extend the <link> element inside the parent <entry> with the code below. Done.

{% if post.ref_url %}
  <link href="{{ post.ref_url }}"/>
{% else %}
  <link href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
{% endif %}

If you want to create a Link-Blog post now, add ref_url to the markdown file header and Octopress takes care of the rest.

---
layout: post
title: "This Awesome Article"
date: 2012-01-13 21:20
comments: true
ref_url: http://somesite.com/thisawesomearticle.html
---
This one is really great, check it out.

##Alternatives

If Jekyll is too nerdy for you, then please checkout tumblr whose philosophy has been based on link-blogging for ages.

On the otherside if Octopress and therefore Ruby is still to cool for you to use then give the newly released Second Crack by Marco Arment a try. It’s also baking your markdown files to flat html ones, but it’s written in PHP.

(Sidenote: PHP and I were never really friends)

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