Tinble

Tinble is a simple, lightweight blog engine that uses Markdown-formatted text files. It started its life as a heavily modified fork of Tiny Blog Engine. Tinble stands for Tiny blog engine.

Tinble is very much old-school. Apart from a tiny bit of JavaScript used for more convenient navigation, the entire application is written in PHP by a clueless but curious human.

Features and functionality

• Lightweight: Only a handful of PHP and CSS files, plus a single optional JavaScript library.
• Straightforward deployment: Copy all the files to the document root of your web server with PHP.
• Syntax highlighting: Using the Rainbow library.
• Dark theme: Available for those who care about it.
• Scheduled article publishing: Articles in the drafts directory are automatically published on the dates specified in the file name prefixes (for example, the 2030年07月18日_first-article.md file in the drafts directory is published automatically on July 18, 2030).
• Pinned articles: You can pin articles to the top by adding pinned anywhere in their file names.
• Simple guestbook: Instead of comments, Tinble comes with an old-school guestbook.
• Search: The search feature can be used to find articles containing the specified search term.
• RSS2 support: Tinble automatically generates RSS feeds.
• i18n support: The application can be easily localized to any language.
• Self-contained: No external dependencies. All required libraries are included.
• Works with simian

Requirements

• A web server with PHP 8.x or higher. Tested with Apache.
• PHP GD extension (for image resizing).
• PHP XML extension (for HTML in Markdown).

Installation

1. Checkout the latest code using Git:

   git clone https://codeberg.org/dmpop/tinble.git
   

   Alternatively, download the source code from the project's Codeberg repository, and unpack the downloaded archive.

2. Move all the files in the tinble directory to the document root of your server.

3. Make the content directory writable by the server. For example:

   chown www-data:www-data -R /var/www/html/content
   

Run Tinble in a Container

Perform the following steps on the machine you want to use as a Tinble server.

1. Install Docker.

2. Run the hostname -I command and note the IP address of the machine.

3. Create a directory for storing content.

4. Clone the Tinble Git repository using the git clone https://codeberg.org/dmpop/tinble.git command.

5. Switch to the resulting tinble directory, open the config.php file for editing, and replace the default value of the $BLOG_URL with the IP address of the machine.

6. Build an image using the docker build -t tinble . command.

7. Run a container:

   docker run -d --rm -p 8000:8000 --name=tinble -v /path/to/content:/usr/src/tinble/content:rw tinble
   

   Replace /path/to/content with the actual path to the created directory.

8. Point the browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000 (replace 127.0.0.1:8000 with the actual IP address or domain name of the machine running the container).

Deploy Tinble with docker-compose.yml

Using the supplied docker-compose.yml file, you can deploy Tinble on a machine with a domain name assigned to it. This approach automatically enables HTTPS.

1. Open the Caddyfile for editing.
2. Replace <email address> with the email address you want to use with the Let's Encrypt service.
3. Replace <domain name> with the domain name assigned to the server.
4. Save the changes.
5. Run the docker compose -d command.

Adding articles

To add an article, create a .md file in the content/articles directory using the following naming rule: yyyy-mm-dd_title.md (for example, 1970年01月01日_this-is-first-article.md).

To insert an image into an article, put the image into the content/articles/img directory and use the following Markdown code:

![This is a nice image](img/image.jpg)

When uploading an image for use in an article, resize the image and reduce its quality. Alternatively, you can use the included tim.php script (requires the GD library), as follows:

![This is a nice image](../tim.php?width=1200&image=content/articles/img/your-image.jpg)

The script resizes the inserted image to the specified width on-the-fly.

Scheduling articles

Place the article you want to publish on a specific date in the content/articles/drafts folder, and use the desired date as the filename prefix. For example, the article named 2030年07月18日_first-article.md will be automatically published on July 18, 2030.

Adding pages

To add a page, create a .md file in the content/pages directory.

License

GNU General Public License version 3

Acknowledgements

• Tiny Blog Engine
• Guestbook
• php-i18n