This Blog

I stole most of the design language for this blog from Gregory Gundersen with consent implied by How I Built this Blog.

I find jekyll and similar systems too opinionated on folder structure. Static site generators all seem to demand you structure your website a certain way.

I want to ensure I never break links, so I am running a custom static site generation toolchain using:

• python
• frontmatter
  • Watch out for "no tabs in YAML".
• jinja2
  • I don't think I would use jinja in prod, but it is great for offline use.
• mistune
  • I had some trouble managing the plugins, but the default parser does everything I want.

I like putting basically all the configuration required into frontmatter. The script itself is actually simple enough to cite here:

# scan the content of the blog

import glob

files = glob.glob("content/" + '**/*.md', recursive=True)

# resources

import frontmatter

resources = [frontmatter.load(f) for f in files]

tags = {}

# build an index of tags to pages

for r in resources:
	if "_tags" in r.keys():
		for t in r["_tags"]:
			if t in tags.keys():
				tags[t].append(r)
			else:
				tags[t] = [r]

# apply templates to resources

from jinja2 import Environment, FileSystemLoader

environment = Environment(loader=FileSystemLoader("templates/"))

import os, os.path

def safe_open_w(path):
    os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(path), exist_ok=True)
    return open(path, 'w')

import mistune

for r in resources:
	print(r["title"])
	template = environment.get_template(r["_template"])
	output = template.render(args=r, content=mistune.html(str(r)), tags=tags)

	for o in r["_targets"]:
		print(o)
		with safe_open_w(os.path.join("output/",o)) as fp:
			fp.write(output)

With this, I generate my articles. I can use the tag system to procedurally generate my indexes and rss feed.