Aegea 2.7 has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.

What’s new

There are several new design themes, which look like this:

All new themes are based on the existing theme Plain, but redefine some CSS variables:

Above is the code of the theme “Douglas”, which looks like this:

You can now easily preview the themes from Settings. There is a link that opens a special contrived page, which includes all sorts of blog elements to test. This makes building themes much easier as you can preview your CSS in one place instead of wandering around the blog looking for elements to check.

The editor now supports these Google Docs keyboard shortcuts, thanks to Igor Adamenko:

There are also multiple improvements to the features related to social networking, comments, search, RSS and JSON feed, uploading of images and audio.

About Aegea

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Oleg Andreev, software designer and crypto-anarchy historian, on Bitcoin and related stuff
• Daniel Lesden on music production
• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears

With Aegea, you can use one of the built-in themes or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

Aegea 2.6 has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.

What’s new:

• Continuous autosaving of form data in post editors. Data is being saved locally in the browser. If the browser or the OS crashes, when you open the editor again, your latest changes will be there. If you edit the post from another device and save the changes to server, the most recent server version will open.
• The new search finds more relevant posts, works faster and formats the results in a better way. It will not show the full posts, but just the fragments with the search query. If the found post contains images, it will show their thumbnails for quicker identification. For example, try searching “street” in this blog.
• It’s now easier to set a post’s cover image for social networks. Just drag an image into the editor’s page. If you drop in onto the Text field, if will be inserted in text, but if you drop it outside the Text field, it will just get added to the post. Social networks will see it as part of the post, but it will not get displayed in its text.
• Improved database migration from older versions.
• Multiple other small improvements.

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears
• Daniel Lesden blog, on music production, by Daniel Lesden.

With Aegea, you can use the built-in neutral theme or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

Before installing Aegea on a server, you may want to try it out locally. This is a manual on how to install it locally on a Mac in a way that I find the best.

Mac comes with a pre-installed Apache. But the way it is configured is rather strange and very hard to use in a productive way. I set up separate host names for all my local projects, such that I can point the browser to the address “aegea” to open Aegea or “ib” to open my website.

Here’s how to do this.

Get Aegea package

This part is the same as in How to install Aegea.

Download the Aegea zip archive from the website and unzip it:

Inside, you will see files like these (the list may differ depending on the version):

Put these files in ~/Sites/aegea/ folder. Select this folder in Finder, press ⌘I, go to the end of the panel, open the lock and change all permissions to “Read & Write”. Then click the gear and select “Apply to enclosed items”.

Configure Apache

Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Uncomment this line:

LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

Do not uncomment the PHP line.

Add the following after other Directory sections:

<Directory "/Users/ilyabirman/Sites">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Multiviews
    MultiviewsMatch Any
    AllowOverride All
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Replace ilyabirman with your username.

Now find and uncomment this line:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now open the very file /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and add this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/ilyabirman/Sites/aegea"
    ServerName aegea
    ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/aegea.l-error_log"
</VirtualHost>

Again, replace ilyabirman with your username.

Finally, open the /etc/hosts file and add the hostname you want to use for local projects:

127.0.0.1 aegea

Now if you point the browser to the address “aegea”, it will request it from the local machine. If Apache is running locally, it will capture the request and look at ~/Sites/aegea/ folder for the content to serve. This will not work just yet because we haven’t installed PHP.

Install PHP and MySQL

Mac comes with a pre-installed PHP, but it’s rather old and doesn’t include GD (a library that Aegea uses to work with images). Install good PHP. I use the installers from the page PHP for macOS as binary package and like them very much. They have never failed me.

Install PHP 5.6 (better for now) or PHP 7.1 by following the instructions on the page.

This will make Apache work with PHP without any changes to the httpd.conf file.

With MySQL it’s even easier: there’s an official native Mac installer available. Download the DMG file and follow the installer’s instructions. Don’t forget to Install the System Preferences pane to be able to start and stop the MySQL server from System Preferences.

Start MySQL and Apache

Open System Preferences, go to MySQL and press “Start MySQL Server”.

Open Terminal and type:

sudo apachectl start

It will ask for your password.

Create a database for Aegea

In Terminal, type:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql

In the MySQL prompt, type:

create database aegea;

Install Aegea

Navigate to “aegea/” with your browser. Without the final “/” Safari will try to do a Google search of “aegea”.

You will see Aegea installer. Enter the following MySQL database access parameters:

The last thing to fill in is the password that you want to use to access your blog (you can change it later):

Click “Start blogging” — and that’s it.

To install Aegea, the blogging engine, you will need:

• A server with Apache, PHP 5 and MySQL,
• FTP or SFTP access to the server or another way to access the server’s file system,
• Access to a MySQL database.

If you don’t have all this or don’t know what this means, you will not be able to install Aegea on your own. Seek assistance.

Get Aegea package
Download the Aegea zip archive from the website and unzip it:

Inside, you will see files like these (the list may differ depending on the version):

Put files on server
Upload all these files to the server (I’m using the FTP client Flow here):

As you can see, I’ve created a “blog” folder on the server and put the files in that folder:

Open Installer with browser
Navigate to the server with your browser. As I’ve created the folder “blog” for Aegea, I go to blogengine.me/blog/:

Enter your MySQL database access parameters: the server, the username, the password and the database name. The last thing to fill in is the password that you want to use to access your blog (you can change it later):

Click “Start blogging” and go:

Permission problems
You may find that instead of the Installer Aegea shows you something like this:

In this case, you need to change the permissions of Aegea’s folder and everything inside it to let the engine do anything it wants. Select the folder “blog” (in my case) and press ⌘I (in Flow’s case) to open its details:

Click the pencil icon next to Permissions (or open the permissions in some other way). Set permissions like this:

Then go back to the browser and press “Try again”. Installer should work now.

Introducing Aegea, a great blogging engine.

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears
• Daniel Lesden blog, on music production, by Daniel Lesden.

With Aegea, you can use the built-in neutral theme or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.