MObtvse

MObtvse is an easy to use blogging platform for people who love Markdown and want a clean web based interface for creating those posts without sacrificing functionality.

It is my firm belief that lovers of Markdown should no longer have to live as second class citizens. We deserve awesome features, and easy to use blogging tools without having to use crudely implemented Markdown add-ons to other people's bloatware.

Inspired by Svbtle and bootstrapped by Obtvse. MObtvse has come a long way, allowing for easy image uploads to Amazon's S3, or simply managing images uploaded elsewhere, but used in your posts. MObtvse has support for static pages (like an "About" page), taggable posts, comments via Disqus (excellent spam prevention), and Svbtle-style Kudos, and a dynamic Archives page that integrates favorite posts (via Kudos), breaks your posts down by month and allows for easy filtering via tags.

Geeks will be happy to know about its Haml based markup (partially implemented) and MongoDB

Everyone will be happy to know that there are screenshots available at the bottom of this document, and a demo server is set up for you to kick the tires on before you try your own installation. Just scroll down to the "Test Drive" section below.

Before you download...

WordPress has had years to make its installation process almost completely painless. Being a relatively new platform MObtvse still requires a little bit of geekness, and familiarity with installing Rails apps to get installed. But, the basics are all documented and a step-by-step installation walk-through is in the works.

Planned

The goal is to add support for:

• Generation of static html files for fast serving, or tools for making that easily implementable.
• Mixpanel
• The MetaWeblog API
• Great features that HTML based blogging platforms like Wordpress have had for years.

See the major ToDo items here.

The New Hotness

Want the latest tweaks, the bleeding edge functionality? Check out the "experimental" branch. New changes are pushed to experimental where they are allowed to percolate for a little while to increase stability, and catch any wayward bugs before they're pushed to the "master" branch. This also helps to minimize the churn in the "master" branch.

Take it for a test drive!

You can try out the recent changes from the "experimental" branch on our demo box, but Please Note: The demo is running on a free Heroku instance and may take a few seconds to boot up. For real-world performance you can see the author's blog.

The home page is here and the admin page is here

• username: username
• password: password

Free MongoDB hosts

If you want to run this on Heroku you're going to need somewhere to put your MongoDB install. Fortunately MongoLab and MongoHQ both have free plans. We'd recommend going with MongoHQ simply because they offer fifteen times more free storage than MongoLab (240Mb vs 16Mb). MObtvse can, of course, point to your own MongoDB install if you have one.

Installation

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9.x (it's time to upgrade folks)
• Ruby Gems and Bundler
• A MongoDB install to point it at (install locally or use one of the free/paid hosting options).

If you are new to Rails development, check out guides for getting your development environment set up for Mac and Windows.

git clone git://github.com/masukomi/mobtvse.git
cd mobtvse
bundle install

Edit config/config.yml to set up your site information. To set up your admin username and password you will need to set your environment variables (see below) or store them in the config.yml.

Edit config/mongoid.yml to point to your mongodb installation (more details below).

Start the local server:

bundle exec rails server thin

Go to 0.0.0.0:3000, to administrate you go to /admin

For production, you will want to set your password in config.yml or with environment variables (preferred). If you are deploying to Heroku you can edit and run script/heroku_env.sh shell script to set up your environment variables and push them to Heroku. Do this after deploying the app to Heroku the first time. Heroku is a "production" environment, and for your security MObtvse only uses environment variables to configure the database and the admin login.

Or in your shell (~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc for example)

export MOBTVSE_LOGIN=<LOGIN>
export MOBTVSE_PASSWORD=<PASSWORD>

MongoDB configuration

When getting things set up in development it is configured by default ( in mongoid.yml) to run against a db named mobtvse_development on localhost

In production you will want to set the following environment variables:

• MONGOID_HOST
• MONGOID_PORT
• MONGOID_USERNAME
• MONGOID_PASSWORD
• MONGOID_DATABASE

You can set these up in your .bashrc file or just copy, and edit, the relevant section of script/heroku_env.sh

Importing from Octopress or Jekyll

MObtvse can import your posts from Octopress and Jekyll. If you've configured S3 support it can also upload all of your images to it, and rewrite the image urls in your posts when appropriate. See the migration doc for details.

Support:

• Twitter: MObtvse
• File an issue on Github.

SCREENSHOTS

Admin Screen

Creating and Editing a Post

Viewing a Single Post

Credit:

MObtvse was written by Kay Rhodes. It's origin lies in Nate Wienert's excellent Obtvse.