Staticsite

This is a simple static html blog generator using only 467 lines (as of this submission) of shell code.

Organization

Posts are placed within dedicated directories, written in markdown, and have .md extension (anything else can be used to effectively save drafts inplace, for example).

Each post begins with a metadata section delimited which comprises all the lines until the first blank line. The currently supported metadata is: title:, date:, modified:, tags:.

• The tags line is a space-separated list of tags that you may want to place in the file.
• The lines with date and modified are recomended to be in format YYYY-MM-DD since these can be easily ordered in lexicographic order.
• The title line is the title of the post and it gets rendered as a heading at the top of the post.

The directories used by the script are registered at blogconfig in a line marked postdirs: which is a space separated list of directory names (don't use directory names with spaces).

For each post directory/post.md the script compiles it to an html file located at cache/directory_post.md (notice the _), registers each tag tagname in the corresponding cache/tag_tagname.html file and registers the post at index.html.

To view the output of the site after compilation simply point your browser to cache/index.html.

Tag files can be enriched with an introduction by writing the corresponding tag_tagname.md file in the directory indices. Similar, a file named index.md in the directory indices will be rendered into the index.html file.

Dependencies

The blog-make script depends on:

• lowdown(1) (for compiling markdown to html. available on the developer's site or on github)
• sqlite3(1) (for keeping a searchable database of the post metadata)
• xmllint(1) (comes bundled with libxml, used to produce the rss feed at feed.xml commonly available from the libxml2/libxml2-utils packages)

Installation

Simply run the install script install.sh which will place the scripts (contained in src) blog blog-template blog-make and blog-deploy on your ~/.local/bin folder (which should be in your path).

If run as root the files will instead be placed in /usr/local/bin.

Running

Before running you should change the blogconfig file to reflect your options.

After writing all your posts, the whole thing can be compiled by running blog make and deployed by running blog deploy.

Note

• There may be slight divergences in the syntax of sed(1) and stat(1) over several different systems, please feel free to report if there are any errors.

Changes in Version 5.0

• Blog posts no longer require the metadata to be placed between lines of dashes, instead they are just the first (naked) paragraph of the file, as expected by lowdown.

Changes in Version 4.0

• The script blog-make now produces an RSS feed published as feed.xml.
• It now requires a dependency on xmllint(1) for parsing the html into the rss feed.

Changes in Version 3.1

• This is a bump up with minor bug fixes and just making the repositor more organized (or presentable at least).
• The gettimestamp function introduced in blog-make makes checks the operating system before issuing a call to stat(1) so that the right flags are used.
• The blog script now verifies where it is located so that it can call blog-make, blog-template and blog-deploy using the full path (and therefore this can be done within a call with sudo(1) or doas(1)).
• The install.sh script now allows systemwide installation (under /usr/local/bin) when installed by root (or using sudo(1) or doas(1)).

Changes in Version 3

• Instead of a hardcoded destination directory the destination is configured in the blogconfig file
• There is now a unified interface using the script blog which wraps around other scripts
• The scripts have been renamed to blog-make, blog-deploy and blog-template
• An installation script (install.sh) now allows a user to install locally the blog deployer.
• The blog directory no longer needs to contain all the scripts

Changes in Version 2

• Posts can now be spread over several folders.
• Configuration takes place in the file blogconfig instead of the script.
• There is no need for the use of INSERTBASEURL anymore since all html files are contained in the same folder.
• Tagindex files are now located at tag_<tagname>.html
• A post called <post>.md located in directory <dir> is located at <dir>_<post>.html
• The compilation step does not compile posts that have not been changed.