RIC ROBERTS

A few weeks ago I moved this blog over to Swirrl’s own open-source Rails+CouchDB blog engine, SemanticJournal (At Swirrl, we like to call it ‘Semjo’ for short).

As well as the standard blogging features, Semjo includes some Semantic Web features, in the form of helpers to aid with marking up elements on public-facing pages with RDFa (such as the date, author, title of articles etc).

Earlier this week, I wrote a bit of documentation and made the Github repository public. So now, you can grab the code at github.com/Swirrl/SemanticJournal, and run your own Semjo blog. The readme file in the repo explains how to get up and running, including designing your own theme.

Current Features:

• CouchDB Storage. Each blog has its own CouchDB database.
• Helpers for marking up elements with RDFa
• Host multiple blogs using the same rails app
• Write articles with Textile markup
• Design the theme used for each blog, using HTML and ERB
• Caching, using Rack/Cache
• Just provides the blog engine only but…
• Easy to extend with 3rd party plugins (e.g. Disqus for comments, ShareThis for social bookmarking, Google for search etc., Gists for Code/Syntax highlighting, S3 for storing other assets used on your blog).

Semjo is still very much work in progress. Please let me know if you encounter any bugs, or if there are any features you would like to see (the README contains my current list of todos).