tarangeeta-blog
🪷 Overview
Tarangeeta (तरंगीता) is a personal blogging platform built on Flask — part content-management system, part quiet space for reflection on spirituality, technology, and everything in between. It pairs a modern block-based writing experience with the practical machinery a real blog needs: authentication, media uploads, SEO, scheduling, comments, and an email-gated admin dashboard.
Content is authored in an Editor.js block editor (with a free-form GrapesJS “canvas” mode for designed layouts), stored as structured JSON, and server-rendered to clean, SEO-friendly, JavaScript-independent HTML on every request. The app runs on SQLite locally and PostgreSQL (Neon) in production, and ships ready to deploy on Render.
Note: A Render deployment blueprint is included, but the public instance is currently offline. The screenshot above was captured from a local run.
✨ Features
| ✍️ Block editor | Editor.js-powered authoring with custom inline tools (colors, highlights, font sizing), autosave, cover images, and audio narration. |
| 🎨 Canvas layouts | Alternate GrapesJS “canvas” post type for fully designed, free-form pages, rendered inside a sandboxed iframe. |
| 🔐 Dual auth | Local email/password (pbkdf2 hashing) plus Google OAuth via Flask-Dance, with email verification for local sign-ups. |
| 🗂️ Admin dashboard | Email-gated CMS with status filters (published / draft / scheduled / archived), search, duplicate, and one-click status changes. |
| ⏱️ Scheduling | Publish now, save as draft, or schedule for later — scheduled posts go live on first read, no background worker required. |
| 🖼️ Cloudinary media | Image, video, and audio uploads; pasted stock-photo links are resolved to direct images and re-hosted automatically. |
| 🔎 Discovery | Categories, tags with slugs, full-text-style search, pagination, related posts, and auto-generated table of contents. |
| 📈 SEO built in | Slug URLs, per-post meta titles/descriptions, Open Graph images, canonical URLs, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt. |
| 💬 Comments & contact | Verified-user comments with Gravatar avatars, plus a contact form that stores messages and emails the admin. |
| 🛡️ Security-minded | Per-request CSP nonces, CSRF protection, HSTS in production, ProxyFix, secure cookies, and bleach HTML sanitization. |
📸 Screenshots
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| About | Log in | Register |
🧩 How It Works
Posts are written as Editor.js JSON (the source of truth) and rendered to sanitized HTML on the server, so published pages stay fast and work without client-side JavaScript. Authentication supports both local accounts and Google OAuth, and the same code path runs on SQLite in development and PostgreSQL in production — legacy postgres:// URLs are auto-normalized and missing columns are backfilled by a lightweight startup migration.
flowchart TD
Visitor([Visitor / Reader]) --> Flask
Admin([Admin author]) --> Flask
subgraph App["Flask App · Gunicorn"]
Flask[Routes & Views]
Auth["Auth<br/>Local + Google OAuth"]
Editor["Block / Canvas editor<br/>Editor.js · GrapesJS"]
Render["Server-side render<br/>editor_render + bleach"]
Flask --> Auth
Flask --> Editor
Editor --> Render
end
Flask --> ORM[("SQLAlchemy ORM")]
ORM --> DB[("SQLite dev<br/>PostgreSQL / Neon prod")]
Auth -. OAuth .-> Google[(Google OAuth)]
Editor -. uploads .-> Cloudinary[(Cloudinary<br/>media)]
Flask -. SMTP .-> Gmail[(Gmail<br/>contact + verify)]
Request lifecycle highlights
- Publish-on-read scheduling — every listing view promotes any scheduled post whose time has arrived, so there is no cron job to run.
- Slug-first URLs — legacy numeric
/post/<id>links301-redirect to canonical/post/<slug>URLs. - Defense in depth — even though only the admin authors content, inline block HTML is passed through a strict bleach allowlist before storage.
🛠️ Tech Stack
| Layer | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Backend | Flask 3, SQLAlchemy 2.0, Flask-SQLAlchemy, Flask-Login, Flask-WTF |
| Auth | Google OAuth (Flask-Dance), pbkdf2 password hashing, email verification |
| Editors | Editor.js block editor, GrapesJS canvas layouts, Flask-CKEditor (legacy import) |
| Content | editor_render (JSON → HTML), bleach sanitization, reading-time & TOC extraction |
| Media | Cloudinary (images, video, audio narration) |
| Frontend | Bootstrap 5, Jinja2 templates, custom CSS |
| Database | SQLite (local) · PostgreSQL / Neon (production) |
| Deployment | Gunicorn, Render (render.yaml blueprint + Procfile), Python 3.12.7 |
🚀 Run Locally
Prerequisites: Python 3.12+
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/dishasawantt/tarangeeta-blog.git
cd tarangeeta-blog
# Create a virtual environment
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Configure environment variables
cp .env.example .env # then edit .env with your values
Run the development server:
python main.py
The app starts at http://localhost:5001 using a local SQLite database. Google OAuth, Cloudinary uploads, and email are optional locally — the app degrades gracefully when those keys are absent.
Environment variables
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
SECRET_KEY |
Yes (production) | Flask session secret |
ADMIN_EMAIL |
Yes | Email that unlocks the admin dashboard & messages |
DATABASE_URL |
No | PostgreSQL URL (defaults to local SQLite) |
GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID / GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET |
For OAuth | Google OAuth credentials |
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME / CLOUDINARY_API_KEY / CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET |
For media | Cloudinary uploads |
MAIL_ADDRESS / MAIL_APP_PASSWORD |
For email | Gmail address + App Password for SMTP |
☁️ Deployment
Tarangeeta is deployable on Render + Neon for $0/month. The repository includes a render.yaml blueprint, a Procfile, and a pinned runtime.txt (Python 3.12.7).
Production start command:
gunicorn main:app --bind 0.0.0.0:$PORT --workers 1
See DEPLOY.md for the full step-by-step guide, including Neon setup, Google OAuth redirect URLs, Gmail App Passwords, and every environment variable.