Publishing with Blot

Blot creates a folder in your Dropbox and publishes files you put inside. These files become blog posts automatically:

• Text .txt, .md
• Images .png, .jpg, .gif
• Word documents .docx
• Bookmarks .webloc
• HTML .html

You can organize your folder however you like. There are three folders which Blot treats differently:

• Pages
  Files in a folder called 'Pages' are added to your blog's menu and do not become blog posts.
• Drafts
  Files inside a folder called 'Drafts' are not published. Blot creates a preview for that file instead.
• Public files
  Files inside a folder whose name starts with an underscore (e.g. '_Media') are not converted into blog posts. You can use this feature to embed an image in a blog post or serve static files.

Metadata

Blot automatically generates a publish date, permalink, thumbnail and a list of tags for each blog post. However, you can specify this metadata yourself:

Date: February 28th, 1973
Permalink: gravity

# Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky.

Metadata must start on the first line and be separated from the rest of the post with a blank line.

You can specify custom metadata and access it in your blog's template.

You can create a page elsewhere in your blog's folder by adding Page: yes to the file's metadata. If you'd like to create a page that isn't on your blog's menu, add Menu: no as well.

Dates

You can specify an entry's publish date in the metadata at the top of a file. Blot supports plenty of formats. The following dates are equivalent:

23/06/2012    23.6.12    23-6-2012    2012-6-23 00:00

You can use the file's path to specify an entry's date. The entries for the following files have a publish date of midnight on February 23rd, 2016:

/2016/2/23/post.txt    /2016/2.23.post.txt   2016_02_23_00:00_post.txt

If you order your dates differently please tell Blot on the settings page. If you change an entry's date to some time in future, Blot will wait until then to publish it.

Permalinks

You can specify an entry's permalink in the metadata at the top of a file. To create a blog post with the permalink example.com/apple/pie, add this:

Permalink: apple/pie

If you don't specify a permalink, Blot will generate one automatically. You can specify the format of this permalink in your blog's preferences. You can use any of the following properties of an entry in its permalink: slug, slug-without-diacritics, name, stem, size, more, menu, page, dateStamp, created, updated, metadata. You can also use any of Moment's date formatting tokens. Please note, you cannot use the path to the entry's source file as it's permalink.

The permalink format...	will produce permalinks like...
{{slug}}	/sample-post
blog/{{slug}}	/blog/sample-post
{{YYYY}}/{{slug}}	/2017/sample-post
{{YYYY}}/{{MM}}/{{D}}/{{slug}}	/2017/10/3/sample-post
{{slug}}-{{MM}}-{{YYYY}}	/sample-post-10-2017

If you're migrating to Blot from a different platform, consider setting up redirects instead of overriding the default permalinks in each blog post.

Tags

You can specify tags in the metadata at the top of a file:

Tags: Literature, Book reviews

You can also use folders to tag posts. For example, files in a folder called [Literature] will become blog posts tagged 'Literature'. You can nest tag folders:

[Literature] / [Book reviews] / Lamiel.txt

Thumbnails

Blot attempts to generate a thumbnail for each blog post. By default, Blot will use the largest JPEG or PNG image in your blog post. You can override this and specify a path or URL to an image in the metadata at the top of a file. If you use a path, make sure the image is inside Blot's folder.

If your blog post has no image, then your blog post will not have a thumbnail. Learn how to use these thumbnails in your template.