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Sunday 28 August 2016

How to Build Your Own Static Site from Matches and Acorns


It is well-known that all site engines and CMSs suck – either they don't have enough features, or have too many features, or don't support this particular dialect of Markdown you're used to, or written using some fancy Node.js frameworks and you can't customise them because you don't know Node.js. Yes, Ghost, I'm looking at you.
This site relies on a couple of programs and shell scripts, but at least I can do with it whatever the fuck I want. The caveat, of course, is that I can also only do what I am able to do; but it only motivates me to learn more – or to give up features I don't really need anyway.
The repository for this site is on Github.

Page generation

All pages are static HTML files without extensions (so that this page would have URL artyom.me/inside and not artyom.me/inside.html).

Pandoc

To generate HTML from Markdown, I use Pandoc. It is written in Haskell, it can generate tables of contents, footnotes, has syntax highlighting and MathJax support, recognizes practically all markup formats, and generally is awesome.

Template

I use my own template for Pandoc. It can be found here. Basically, Pandoc generates bare HTML from Markdown and then it uses the template to complete the page, along with some modifications depending on variables.

Unfinished vs. finished

<div style="background-color:$if(unfinished)$ #eb2142 $else$ #19e672 $endif$"...
I can supply variables to Pandoc – for instance, this metadata block
---
unfinished: true
---
at the top of the Markdown source declares a variable called unfinished. Pandoc's $if(unfinished)$ foo $else$ bar $endif$ means that it will insert “foo” if unfinished is present and “bar” otherwise (actual value of unfinished doesn't matter). In this case I'm using unfinished to change the color of page header from green to red.

Last modified at

This site was last updated on <b>$today$</b>
Here Pandoc will splice value of variable today into the file (I used to also provide hour and minute of last modification, but these are gone now as it forces all files to change all the time I update the site, not just the first time I do it on some particular day – and having to wait for all files to be uploaded every single time I want to fix a typo is painful). This variable is passed to Pandoc in generating script; more on that later.

View source

<a href="https://github.com/neongreen/artyom.me/blob/master/$src$">view source</a>
Again, src is passed to Pandoc.

Next in series

When I include a series variable into file, Pandoc creates a box at the end of page which contains links to previous and next pages in series, as well as a link to “table of contents” or the first page in series or something.
The series block looks like this:
---
series:
  top: “Learning Racket” series
  toplink: /#racket
  next: /learning-racket-2
---
and it is handled by this piece of template file:
$if(series.top)$
<div id="series">
  $if(series.prev)$
    <a href="$series.prev$">&lt;&lt;&lt;</a>
  $else$
    <span class="gray"><a href="$series.toplink$">&lt;&lt;&lt;</a></span>
  $endif$
  
  <a href="$series.toplink$">$series.top$</a>

  $if(series.next)$
    <a href="$series.next$">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a>
  $else$
    <span class="gray"><a href="$series.toplink$">&gt;&gt;&gt;</a></span>
  $endif$
</div>
$endif$
When series.next or series.prev are not defined, they're replaced with top links.

CSS

You can see the file here (it's not minimised). I didn't know how to write CSS, so I mostly stole bits and pieces from other places.

Custom classes

I have a few custom classes. For instance, wrapping a piece of Markdown into <div class="note"> ... </div> results in this:
This is a sidenote (which isn't actually a sidenote but whatever).
This happens due to this piece of CSS:
.note {
    background: #CCE8FF;
    padding: 1px 1em;
    margin-left: 0;
    margin-right: 0;
    border: 1px solid #80C6FF; }

.note p {
    margin: 1em 0; }
In the same vein, making text “ghosted” (gray text, gray links) is done by
.gray                 {color: #AAA;}
.gray a:link          {color: #888;}
.gray a:visited       {color: #777;}

Tables

For tables I use this style:
th, td {
    padding: 1px 8px; }

table {
    margin-bottom: 1em;
    width: 100%;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto; }

table, th, td {
    border: 0.5px solid grey;
    border-spacing: 0; }
Because of width: 100%, tables are full-width by default. To make a table narrow, I wrap it into <div class="autowidth"> ... </div>, which is defined as
.autowidth > * {
    width: auto; }
In this example, > * gives attribute width: auto to all children which are exactly one level deep.

Bells and whistles

Typo correction

As you know (hopefully), you can select any text on this page, press Ctrl-Enter and it will be reported to me. This is done using Orphus. They provide a script to insert into your page and it will do everything automatically, but this script is a) minimised, and b) doesn't work without an Orphus image on the page (and it even checks dimensions of the image to prevent 1×1 transparent images), which is why I modified it a bit.
Since you most people can't would probably have trouble pressing Ctrl-Enter on a phone or tablet, I made the script export its reporting procedure and added a button calling it. Here's the code for the button:
<button type="button" onclick="orphus.reportSelected();"
        style="padding:0.2em">this button</button>
and here's how to make a script export a function:
orphus = (function () {

  // ... all code ...

  return {
    reportSelected: reportSelected };
})();
Not present yet. If you know of a good one (instant search, preferably server-side), let me know.

Statistics

One word: Piwik. It's really simple to install and maintain, but if you can't install anything on your server, you could also use Google Analytics.
By the by, I don't hide my stats.

Scripts

Generation

Page and feed generation is done by this script, which I run on my laptop. First it queries current date, and then for each file with .md extension it runs Pandoc, passing to it variables src (name of file being processed) and today.
You need pandoc-contrib if you want shortcut links to work.
RSS feed is generated from a description file (it simply reads a value corresponding to an RSS feed – perhaps I should switch to JSON or YAML, tho).

Uploading

Uploading is done by this script, which is currently just one line:
rsync --exclude '.git' -PLcr . root@artyom.me:/var/artyom.me/

from https://artyom.me/inside
项目地址:https://github.com/neongreen/artyom.me
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