The easiest way to publish blog articles on the web.

prose.sh is a free service

Features #

• No install
• GitHub flavored markdown
• A managed blog hosted at https://{user}.prose.sh
• Custom domains
• Publish posts using rsync, sftp, or scp
• Blog analytics
• Looks great on any device
• Bring your own editor
• Public-key based authentication
• No ads, zero browser-based tracking
• No javascript
• Subscriptions with RSS
• Blog customization with metafiles

Check out the discovery page on prose.

Publish #

Create posts using your favorite editor in plain text files.

~/blog/hello-world.md

 1---
 2date: 2022-06-28
 3---
 4
 5# hello world!
 6
 7This is my first blog post.
 8
 9Check out some resources:
10
11- [pico.sh](https://pico.sh)
12- [antoniomika](https://antoniomika.me)
13- [bower.sh](https://bower.sh)
14
15Cya!

When your post is ready to be published, copy the file to our server with a familiar command:

1rsync ~/blog/* prose.sh:/
2# - or -
3scp ~/blog/* prose.sh:/
4# - or -
5sftp prose.sh
6# - or -
7sshfs ~/blog prose.sh:/

Read more about uploading files.

Since we are leveraging tools you already have on your computer, there is nothing to install. This provides the convenience of a web app, but from inside your terminal!

Images #

We also support image uploading. Simply upload your images alongside your markdown files and then reference them from root /:

1---
2title: hello world!
3---
4
5![profile pic](/profile.jpg)

1rsync ~/blog/*.jpg prose.sh:/

All images are uploaded to a pages site called prose. This means that there's an auto-generated project where you can quickly access all your blog images via https://{user}-prose.pgs.sh

When you upload an image to prose, we make it web optimized (e.g. strip exif and reduce filesize). We also support an image manipulation API!

Blog structure #

Think of your blog as a flat list of files, similar to how your blog is rendered as a flat list of posts.

All filenames uploaded to prose must be unique.

We do not support storing files in different folders. On your local machine, you can store files however you like, but once uploaded to us, we lose all directory structure information and only keep the filename.

For example, if you have two posts in different folders but the same filename and try to upload them to prose, the second post will overwrite the first one.

Blog customization #

User can change the look-and-feel of their blog by uploading special files.

_readme.md #

This file will allow users to add content above the blog post list, add links to their blog landing page, and change blog metadata.

 1---
 2title: some title!
 3description: this is a great description
 4nav:
 5  - google: https://google.com
 6  - site: https://some.site
 7image: og_image.jpg
 8card: summary # or summary_large_image
 9favicon: favicon.ico
10layout: aside # or default
11with_styles: true
12---
13
14This block will be rendered above the list of blog posts on the index page!

title #

Title changes your blog's name which will show up as the metadata title for the blog index page and changes the blog post link back to the main blog page.

description #

The description is used as the metadata description on the blog page.

nav #

This property sets the navigation links on the blog index page. The rss link is always appended to the end of this list.

image and card #

These properties are used for og and image metadata when for when a blog is shared. If a blog post does not have its own image or card properties, then it will assume the blog's image and card properties.

favicon #

This property will change the favicon for the blog and posts. Link to an ico image.

layout #

This property changes the layout of the blog index page. The options are:

• aside
• default

with_styles #

This determines whether we load our default styles onto your blog or not. This allows for better customization in conjunction with _styles.css which is the user-defined CSS stylesheet that gets served.

_styles.css #

This will allow users to change the look-and-feel of their blog. This file will be the final CSS loaded on the page so it will overwrite whatever styles have previously been added. We've also added a couple of convenience id's attached to the body element for the blog and post pages.

 1/* _styles.css */
 2#post {
 3  color: green;
 4}
 5
 6#blog {
 7  color: tomato;
 8}
 9
10header {}
11main {}
12footer {}
13article {}

Further we add the post slug as a class on the body element. So if you upload a file called barrel.md then the body element will have:

1<body id="post" class="barrel"></body>

_footer.md #

This file will be added to the end of every single blog post.

There is nothing that differentiates itself from the rest of the post so it's up to you to style it. For convenience we added an id to the containing element post-footer.

_404.md #

This file will override the default 404 page when a post cannot be found.

1---
2title: Not found
3description: Where are you going?
4---
5
6This page doesn't exist.

Post customization #

We support adding frontmatter to the top of your posts. A frontmatter looks like the following:

 1---
 2title: some title!
 3description: this is a great description
 4date: 2022-06-28
 5tags: [feature, announcement]
 6image: og_image.jpg
 7card: summary # or summary_large_image
 8draft: true
 9toc: true # or false or integer for max heading depth
10aliases:
11  - 2023/03/10/my-post
12---

title #

Title changes the title of the blog post.

description #

Description changes the description metadata for the blog post.

date #

We highly recommend specifying a date because this preserves your actual publish date and not when the database record was created by us.

This is the published date. It ought to be in YYYY-MM-DD format. If this date is set to the future, the post will be unlisted until the date provided is today or in the past.

image and card #

These properties are used for og and image metadata when for when a blog is shared. If a blog post does not have its own image or card properties, then it will assume the blog's image and card properties.

draft #

This property will change the listing status of a blog post. If draft: true then the post will be published but unlisted. It will not show up on the blog index page or RSS feed for your blog.

However, the post is still publicly accessible! This gives users the ability to share posts before "publishing" them.

toc #

This property adds a table of contents to the blog post based on the headers. If set to false then no table will be rendered. If set to true then table will be rendered. If set to an integer greater than 0 then it will set the max heading depth to that value. So if set to 2 the table will only render links of heading h1 and h2.

Examples:

1---
2toc: false # no table of contents
3toc: true # table of contents with all headings
4toc: 1 # with only h1 headings
5toc: 2 # with only h1 and h2 headings
6toc: 3 # with only h1, h2, and h3 headings
7---

aliases #

This property will redirect all routes listed to this blog post. Primarily used for migrating from a different blog platform to prose.

1---
2aliases:
3  - 2023/03/10/my-post
4  - my-post.html
5---

Without frontmatter #

If the user does not provide a frontmatter, we will set the following defaults:

• date set to date when uploaded
• title inferred from first h1 header (e.g. # header) or else the filename
• tags inferred from any hashtags inside content

Remove ad footer #

We don't mind. Upload a CSS file _styles.css with:

1footer {
2  display: none;
3}