Jack Baty

I tend to write a few types of posts: daily journals, longer posts, short notes, and photo posts. No blogging tool I've used has done each of these well. The closest I have so far is daily.baty.net. This is a journal post using Pure Blog.

This blog will probably be about blogging with Pure Blog most of the time, since it's why I made it. Maybe don't subscribe to RSS just yet :)

I tried changing the page colors here. I wanted the header to be a different color. CSS light/dark switching confuses me and I couldn't figure it out, so I reverted to stock.

LATER: I decided I wanted my own colors more than I want to make a dark version available, so we're all light, all the time now. At least the background isn't pure white, so good enough?

Just to be clear, I don't have serious plans to migrate my main Baty.net (Hugo) blog to Pure Blog. That doesn't mean I won't explore the "But what if I converted baty.net to Pure Blog?" scenario.

Things will be wonky while I tinker. Probably don't link to anything here, since I'm almost certain the links will break.

Some things I've noticed:

• Date formats in YAML are inconsistent with different SSGs. For example, Hugo wants date: 2026-02-05 05:29:52 -0500 and Pure Blog uses date: 2026-02-07 16:25 which throws an error in Hugo. Adding seconds to the date fixes it.
• Quoted strings in YAML front matter are optional. Many of my Hugo posts do quote the title: attribute using either single or double quotes. Would need to be removed, because in Pure Blog, those quotes are included as part of the title, etc. Same goes for tags: ["Tag1","Tag2"] vs [Tag1,Tag2].

This has been mostly superceded by the built-in upgrade mechanism introduced in version 1.5.0.

Since everything in Pure Blog is all in one folder, I needed some way to back things up and deploy updates to the code, independent of the content. I use just with a few basic recipies.

Available recipes:

• default - Lists recipies (e.g. just --list)
• backup-to-local - Pulls content, code, and custom config to a dated folder on my local machine
• serve - Run local PHP version of the site
• upgrade - Runs git pull locally
• deploy - Send just the source php to the server

Here's my justfile so far:

SERVER_HOST := "myserver.com"
SERVER_USER := "myuser"
SERVER_DIR := "/server/path/to/blog"
LOCAL_DIR := "~/local/path/to/blog"
BACKUP_DIR := "~/local/path/to/backups"
BACKUP_DATE := `date +%Y-%m-%d`
PUBLIC_DIR := "{{LOCAL_DIR}}"
TARGET := "Server03"

default:
    just --list

serve:
  php -S localhost:8000

upgrade:
    git pull

backup-to-local:
    echo "Backing up to {{BACKUP_DIR}}/{{BACKUP_DATE}}"
    rsync -avz {{SERVER_HOST}}:{{SERVER_DIR}}/ \
    {{BACKUP_DIR}}/{{BACKUP_DATE}} \
    --delete

deploy: 
    @echo "\033[0;32mDeploying updates to {{TARGET}}...\033[0m"
    rsync -v -rz \
    --checksum \
    --delete \
    --no-perms \
    --exclude /content/ \
    --exclude /config/ \
    --exclude /assets/images/ \
    --exclude /assets/css/custom.css \
    --exclude justfile \
    {{LOCAL_DIR}} {{SERVER_USER}}@{{SERVER_HOST}}:{{SERVER_DIR}}

I threw all this together rather quickly, so I'm sure there's more to do. Maybe there's a better way to handle this?

So, here we are, testing Kev's new blogging tool, Pure Blog. It looks like this:

It's super simple. I had this site running in about 10 minutes. Now what? Custom CSS, probably. 😁

This is only for testing purposes (so far).