Why Justwriting

Previously I used Octopress. It is a wonderful blog system, however, as I posted more than 20 articles the website generation becomes very slow. On the other hand, as I can visit Dropbox directly, I would like to post blogs via Dropbox. It could be much more convenient.

Justwriting is simple and powerful, though requires some basic PHP and Nginx configuration knowledge. This blog article aims to help readers to configure the environments for the Justwriting blog system.

Optional: Remove Apache and nginx

If you installed Apache and Nginx before, perhaps you need to remove them. In my case, as I installed them via different sources (apt-get and source codes and so on), some conflicts are not fixable for me. The easiest way is to remove and reinstall them for a new user like me.

This is a tutorial to remove apache2 and another tutorial to delete Nginx.

Note that both Apache and Nginx are web servers, and please pick up only one of them. Here we select Nginx.

Install and Configure nginx

You need a machine to serve as the server. I rent the DigitalOcean VPS for VPN, torrent seedbox and Justwriting, and it costs 5 USD per month.

This is the tutorial to install Nginx on Ubuntu, and it's also from DigitalOcean.

Install PHP

As Justwriting is young, no tutorial tells me that I need to install PHP for it. The developers are all familiar with PHP but not me.

So I found this tutorial to install PHP.

Configure nginx

If you take a look at the above Nginx tutorial, you will know how to configure your Nginx following the official Justwriting Nginx configuration.

Highlight math formulas

The first article in the default Justwriting code package is to test the LaTeX math formula. To show it on your blog, just remove the comment signs at the bottom of the `settings.php``

To show the $$E=mc^2$$, just write

$$E=mc^2$$

Conclusion

As you can see, it takes a long time and lots of steps to configure this blog system. After the configuration, at least I gain more knowledge about web server.