How to install and use Dead Simple Blog Generator.

DSBG: Dead Simple Blog Generator DSBG is a minimalist, single-binary static blog generator written in Go. Point it at a folder of Markdown/HTML files, run one command, and get a clean, modern, fast blog. Why DSBG? Zero Setup: No runtime dependencies. Just one binary. Fast by Design: Concurrent processing, instant rebuilds in watch mode. Clean, Modern Output: Responsive layout, dark/light themes, code highlighting, MathJax. Smart Content Handling: Frontmatter, tag extraction, date parsing, automatic resource copying:DSBG only copies resources (images, PDFs, videos) that are explicitly referenced in your Markdown or HTML. Unused files in your content folder are not moved to the output. Full-Text Search: Built-in Lunr-powered search index. Social Sharing Ready: Add your own share buttons with URL templates. RSS Included: Automatic, standards-compliant feed. Pages & Posts: Tag PAGE to add top-level navigation pages. Note: HTML files tagged as PAGE should live in their own dedicated subfolders; DSBG copies the entire parent folder to preserve local scripts and assets. Easy Customization: Themes, custom CSS/JS, custom favicon, publisher metadata, and more. SEO-Ready Out of the Box: Open Graph, JSON-LD schema, canonical/share URL overrides, publisher logo. Smarter Index Page: Tag filters, fuzzy full-text search with snippets, and one-click Copy Markdown sharing. Flexible Input & Dates: Markdown or HTML, auto-extracted tags/metadata, and date parsing from filenames or file mtimes. Quick Start Install Binary Releases: Download the latest release from GitHub. Or via Go: go install github.com/tesserato/DSBG@latest or go install github.com/tesserato/DSBG@v0.1.4 Generate a Site dsbg -input content/ -output public/ -title "My Blog" -watch Serves your site at: http://localhost:666 Writing Content DSBG uses standard Markdown with YAML frontmatter. To get a quick start template with the current date pre-filled, simply run: dsbg -h Copy the output from the TEMPLATE EXAMPLE section into a new .md file. Example structure: --- title: My New Post description: A short summary of the post. created: 2025 11 22 tags: Technology, Go coverImagePath: image.webp --- # Hello World My first post with DSBG! Configuration & Flags DSBG exposes many options for themes, sorting, metadata, sharing, custom assets, and more. Run dsbg -h for the full list of commands, available themes, and flags. Deploying The generated folder is 100% static: deploy anywhere: GitHub Pages Netlify Vercel Cloudflare Pages Any static hosting service Notes 1. URLs & File Structure “Clean URL” Transformation: DSBG converts every input file into a directory containing an index.html. Input: content/posts/my-cool-story.md Output: public/posts/my-cool-story/index.html Result: Your URL becomes domain.com/posts/my-cool-story/ (trailing slash). URL Sanitization: URLs are aggressive sanitized. Non-alphanumeric characters are removed, and spaces/underscores become dashes (e.g., C# for C++/CLI becomes csharp-for-cpluspluscli). Dates in URLs: By default, date patterns (e.g., 2024-11-03-) are stripped from filenames and URLs. Use -keep-date-in-paths to preserve them. 2. Dates & Sorting Date Hierarchy: The creation date is determined in this priority order: Frontmatter/Meta Tag (created: YYYY-MM-DD). Filename Pattern (2023-10-05-my-post.md). File Modification Time (Warning: This may change if you clone the repo to a new machine). Date Formats: Dates must be in recognizable numeric formats (e.g., 2024-03-03 10:00) for the parser to detect them. Sorting: The -sort flag is strict and only accepts specific values like date-created, reverse-date-created, title, etc. 3. Tags & Organization Folders = Tags: By default, folder names become tags. A file in content/linux/kernel/ gets linux and kernel tags automatically. Disable with -ignore-tags-from-paths. PAGE Tag: Articles tagged with PAGE are removed from the main feed and added to the top navigation bar. HTML PAGE Isolation: If an HTML file is tagged as PAGE, its entire parent folder is copied recursively to the output. Isolate HTML pages in their own subfolders to avoid duplicating unrelated files. 4. Resource Handling Smart Copying: DSBG only copies resources (images, PDFs, videos) explicitly referenced in your content. Unreferenced files are ignored. Relative Paths: Root-relative paths (e.g., /img/logo.png) are treated as relative to the article’s directory, not the site root. Strict Validation: By default, the build fails if a referenced resource is missing. Use -ignore-errors to log warnings instead. 5. SEO & Social Features Base URL Required: For production builds, you must set -base-url https://yourdomain.com. Without it, RSS feeds, Sitemaps, and Social Sharing preview cards (Open Graph) will point to localhost. Canonical URLs: You can override the auto-generated canonical URL per post using the canonical_url frontmatter field. Share URL: The share_url field overrides the link used by share buttons, useful for “link blogs” where the post title should link to an external site. 6. Theming & Customization Highlighting Detection: Syntax highlighting (Light/Dark) is automatically chosen by scanning your theme CSS for color-scheme: dark;. Custom CSS: Providing a -css-path replaces the built-in theme entirely. Custom JS: Providing a -js-path appends your script to the default functionality (search, copy buttons, etc. remain active). Table Styling: All Markdown tables are wrapped in <div class="table-wrapper"> to allow for responsive scrolling and styling. 7. Watch Mode Port: Default server port is 666. Live Reload: The browser automatically opens on start. Content, assets, and custom CSS/JS are watched for changes. Cache Busting: A version query string (?v=TIMESTAMP) is appended to assets on every rebuild to ensure you always see the latest changes. Contributing PRs and feature suggestions are welcome! GitHub: https://github.com/tesserato/DSBG Star History https://star-history.com/#tesserato/DSBG&Date https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dead-simple-blog-generator?embed=true&utm_source=badge-featured&utm_medium=badge&utm_source=badge-dead-simple-blog-generator

Screenshots of the available themes

Besides the default theme, you can also choose the dark and colorful themes: Dark: Colorful:

Demonstrating how DSBG gets dates from the path.

This post shows how DSBG can automatically extract the date from the file path, and use this path to also extract the tags for the article. If no date is defined in frontmatter or file metadata, DSBG will try to use the date provided in the filename or path for date information. If no date pattern is found anywhere, it will use the file modification time. DSBG will also try to extract tags from the directory name. For example, content/2024-07-10-my-example/my-post.md will automatically include a tag named 2024-07-10-my-example. This path will also show that when the flag -keep-date-in-paths is set, the dates won’t be removed from the generated paths.

Version 0.0.5 of DSBG is out with support for share buttons

In addition to minor improvements, particularly to the default themes, version 0.0.5 of DSBG introduces support for share buttons. These buttons utilize native intent APIs to facilitate sharing on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and X. We opted to implement this feature from scratch, rather than relying on a third-party library, to ensure the generated pages remain as fast and tracking-free as possible. At their core, these share buttons are simply static links generated during compilation. Each SVG icon is approximately 1 KB, ensuring a negligible impact on performance. Download a https://github.com/tesserato/DSBG/releases or use go install github.com/tesserato/DSBG@v0.0.5

Version 0.0.6 of DSBG is out with support for sorting

Added support for sorting articles by created date, updated date, title, original path or tag. Download a https://github.com/tesserato/DSBG/releases or use go install github.com/tesserato/DSBG@v0.0.6 After install run dsbg -h for usage instructions.

Continuing to open-source internal tools, I'm releasing CodeWeaver, a CLI to generate a single markdown file from a directory of source files. The idea is to facilitate sharing and feeding the codebase information to AI tools. Check out https://github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver for more.

from https://github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver: CodeWeaver: Generate a Markdown Document of Your Codebase Structure and Content CodeWeaver is a command-line tool designed to weave your codebase into a single, easy-to-navigate Markdown document. It recursively scans a directory, generating a structured representation of your project’s file hierarchy and embedding the content of each file within code blocks. This tool simplifies codebase sharing, documentation, and integration with AI/ML code analysis tools by providing a consolidated and readable Markdown output. The output for the current repository can be found https://github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver/blob/main/codebase.md. Key Features Comprehensive Codebase Documentation: Generates a Markdown file that meticulously outlines your project’s directory and file structure in a clear, tree-like format. Code Content Inclusion: Embeds the complete content of each file directly within the Markdown document, enclosed in syntax-highlighted code blocks based on file extensions. Flexible Path Filtering: Utilize regular expressions to define ignore patterns, allowing you to exclude specific files and directories from the generated documentation (e.g., .git, build artifacts, specific file types). Optional Path Logging: Choose to save lists of included and excluded file paths to separate files for detailed tracking and debugging of your ignore rules. Simple Command-Line Interface: Offers an intuitive command-line interface with straightforward options for customization. Installation If you have Go installed, run go install github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver@latestto install the latest version of CodeWeaver or go install github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver@vX.Y.Z to install a specific version. Alternatively, download the appropriate pre built executable from the https://github.com/tesserato/CodeWeaver/releases. If necessary, make the codeweaver executable by using the chmod command: chmod +x codeweaver Usage For help, run codeweaver -h For actual usage, run codeweaver [options] Options: Option Description Default Value -dir <directory> The root directory to scan and document. Current directory (.) -output <filename> The name of the output Markdown file. codebase.md -ignore "<regex patterns>" Comma-separated list of regular expression patterns for paths to exclude. \.git.* -included-paths-file <filename> File to save the list of paths that were included in the documentation. None -excluded-paths-file <filename> File to save the list of paths that were excluded from the documentation. None -help Display this help message and exit. Examples Generate documentation for the current directory: ./codeweaver This will create a file named codebase.md in the current directory, documenting the structure and content of the current directory and its subdirectories (excluding paths matching the default ignore pattern \.git.*). Specify a different input directory and output file: ./codeweaver -dir=my_project -output=project_docs.md This command will process the my_project directory and save the documentation to project_docs.md. Ignore specific file types and directories: ./codeweaver -ignore="\.log,temp,build" -output=detailed_docs.md This example will generate detailed_docs.md, excluding any files or directories with names containing .log, temp, or build. Regular expression patterns are comma-separated. Save lists of included and excluded paths: ./codeweaver -ignore="node_modules" -included-paths-file=included.txt -excluded-paths-file=excluded.txt -output=code_overview.md This command will create code_overview.md while also saving the list of included paths to included.txt and the list of excluded paths (due to the node_modules ignore pattern) to excluded.txt. Contributing Contributions are welcome! If you encounter any issues, have suggestions for new features, or want to improve CodeWeaver, please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request on the project’s GitHub repository. License CodeWeaver is released under the LICENSE. See the LICENSE file for complete license details.

An extended test post to explore more edge cases and Markdown features, including citations, tables (long and short), and more. This post aims to thoroughly test formatting and rendering capabilities. Lets extend this description, for example: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

If you are seeing this post through the blog, you can find the source code for this post https://github.com/tesserato/DSBG/blob/main/sample_content/07%20test%20post.md. Very long H1 heading: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Very long H2 heading: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Very long H3 heading: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Very long H4 heading: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Very long H5 heading: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Markdown Content Examples Here’s a mix of common Markdown elements to show you how they look: Math Inline math ($ … $): \(E = mc^2\) Paragraph math (\$\$ … \$\$): \[\hat{f} (\xi)=\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}f(x)e^{-2\pi ix\xi} dx \] Lists Unordered list item Another unordered list item Nested unordered list item Another nested unordered list item Doubly nested unordered list item Another doubly nested unordered list item Triply nested unordered list item Another triply nested unordered list item Yet another triply nested unordered list item Quadruply nested unordered list item Another quadruply nested unordered list item Yet another quadruply nested unordered list item Yet another list item Another list item Ordered list item Another ordered list item Nested ordered list item Another nested ordered list item Doubly nested ordered list item Another doubly nested ordered list item Triply nested ordered list item Another triply nested ordered list item Yet another triply nested ordered list item Quadruply nested ordered list item Another quadruply nested ordered list item Yet another quadruply nested ordered list item Yet another ordered list item Another ordered list item Code You can include code blocks with syntax highlighting: Go example: package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Println("Hello, DSBG!") } Rust example: fn main() { println!("Hello, DSBG!"); } Python example: def main(): print("Hello, DSBG!") if __name__ == "__main__": main() JavaScript example: function main() { console.log("Hello, DSBG!"); } main(); Images Images are automatically copied to the output directory: Text Formatting Here’s some bold and italic text, and some inline code. Links and Quotes Check out this https://example.com. This is a block quote. Useful for citing resources. More Markdown Features & Edge Cases Let’s push the boundaries with more features and edge cases. Horizontal Rules Here are different ways to create horizontal rules: --- *** ___ Strikethrough This text is strikethrough. Task Lists Completed task Incomplete task Nested completed task Nested incomplete task Emojis Let’s see if emojis render correctly: 🎉 👍 🚀 🤔 HTML Basic HTML should be ignored or rendered as raw HTML depending on the Markdown processor. Let’s try a simple <br> and <span>. This is line 1.<br>This is line 2. This is line 1. This is line 2. This is <span style="color:red;">red text</span>. This is red text. Escaping Characters Characters that have special meaning in Markdown can be escaped with a backslash \. *asterisks* _underscores_ #hash# \backslash\ `backtick` >greater than> <less than< [brackets[ ]brackets] (parentheses( )parentheses) This is an outer blockquote. This is a nested blockquote. And this is even more nested. -- Tables Short Table Header 1 Header 2 Header 3 Cell 1 Cell 2 Cell 3 Cell 4 Cell 5 Cell 6 Long Table This table is designed to be wide and tall to test scrolling and wrapping behaviors. Very Long Header Column 1 Very Long Header Column 2 Very Long Header Column 3 Very Long Header Column 4 Very Long Header Column 5 Very Long Header Column 6 Very Long Header Column 7 Very Long Header Column 8 Very Long Header Column 9 Very Long Header Column 10 Very Long Content Cell 1 Very Long Content Cell 2 Very Long Content Cell 3 Very Long Content Cell 4 Very Long Content Cell 5 Very Long Content Cell 6 Very Long Content Cell 7 Very Long Content Cell 8 Very Long Content Cell 9 Very Long Content Cell 10 Another Long Cell 1 Another Long Cell 2 Another Long Cell 3 Another Long Cell 4 Another Long Cell 5 Another Long Cell 6 Another Long Cell 7 Another Long Cell 8 Another Long Cell 9 Another Long Cell 10 More Content Cell 1 More Content Cell 2 More Content Cell 3 More Content Cell 4 More Content Cell 5 More Content Cell 6 More Content Cell 7 More Content Cell 8 More Content Cell 9 More Content Cell 10 And Even More Content 1 And Even More Content 2 And Even More Content 3 And Even More Content 4 And Even More Content 5 And Even More Content 6 And Even More Content 7 And Even More Content 8 And Even More Content 9 And Even More Content 10 Last Row Long Cell 1 Last Row Long Cell 2 Last Row Long Cell 3 Last Row Long Cell 4 Last Row Long Cell 5 Last Row Long Cell 6 Last Row Long Cell 7 Last Row Long Cell 8 Last Row Long Cell 9 Last Row Long Cell 10 One More Row Cell 1 One More Row Cell 2 One More Row Cell 3 One More Row Cell 4 One More Row Cell 5 One More Row Cell 6 One More Row Cell 7 One More Row Cell 8 One More Row Cell 9 One More Row Cell 10 Table with Mixed Content Type Description Example Bold Text with strong emphasis **bold text** Italic Text with emphasis *italic text* Code Inline code `inline code` url Hyperlink [example link](https://example.com) Citations and Footnotes While Markdown doesn’t have explicit citation syntax, footnotes can be used to create citations or references.#fn:1 Here is some text that needs a citation.#fn:2 And another sentence that also needs a citation.#fn:3 Very Long Words and Strings Let’s test how very long words and strings are handled, especially for layout and wrapping. VeryLongWordWithoutSpacesToTestWordBreakingAndOverflow. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Combinations Let’s combine some features for fun: A list item with bold text, italic text, and https://example.com. A blockquote containing inline code and a https://example.com and italic text. A table cell with bold text, italic text, inline code, and https://example.com. Combination Type Example Content List Item 1. A list item with bold text, italic text, and https://example.com. Table Cell A table cell with bold text, italic text, inline code, and https://example.com. This extended test post should cover a wider range of Markdown features and edge cases, providing a more thorough test of rendering and formatting. This is an example citation footnote. You can put your citation details here. For example, Author, Title, Publisher, Year. #fnref:1↩︎ Another citation footnote, perhaps to a different source. #fnref:2↩︎ And yet another footnote to demonstrate multiple citations. #fnref:3↩︎

DSBG v0.1.5 brings 7 mobile friendly themes and the new template variables TAG, TAGS and IMAGE.

Contribute with new themes, eventual bugfixes, requests, ideas or just spreading the word!

An example html page with custom CSS

Welcome to My Custom Post / This is an example post that uses its own stylesheet This post shows a custom HTML page with its own css file. Check the code and the generated page to see how it works. © My Custom Post, 2024