Whisper

Whisper is a lightweight weblaaagh server. Whisper is around 1400 lines of code, requires no database, can serve over 2000 requests per second, and can output HTML, RSS, and text.

Features:

• No RDBMS. Blog posts, and comments, are stored as "ennanced" Textile files on disk. You can keep your content under version control, and you can edit it with whatever editor you desire. Whisper Works Great With Git (tm).
• Pagination, labels, per-label and per-author indices, etc.
• Blazing performance. Sits directly on top of Thin. All content and indices are cached and maintained as part of a big dependency graph. That means that almost every request is served directly from memory, and making a change (like adding or updating an entry) forces a regeneration of only those bits that require it. For benchmarks, see http://all-thing.net/whisper-benchmarks.
• Arbitrary markup enhancements: Whisper posts are Textile, but Whisper allows you to transform arbitrary regions with your own formatting code. transformed by user-defined code. The default setup includes formatters to syntax highlight Ruby code and to turn LaTeX math expressions into pretty math.
• Fully threaded comments. Why would you not have this?
• Blog post as micro mailing list. Comments are made via email and automatically converted into a threaded entry on the post page. This allows users to quote, reply to specific messages, and generally have a reasonable discussion.
• Multiformat support. In addition to HTML and RSS output, there’s a plain text mode for the hard-core.

Caveats

Whisper currently only supports comments via email. Textboxes are for the birds.

Usage

1. gem sources -a http://masanjin.net/ (you only need to do this once)
2. gem install whisper
3. whisper-init <blog directory>
4. Follow the instructions!

Whisper is brought to you by William Morgan.