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Rewriting my Site Generator

2024-01-13

=> #Capsule | #Projects

It’s a new year and a new me. Now that I have finally graduated, I feel that I have more time to work on my side projects. One of the first big things I have done is rewriting my site generator once again.

=> Simple Site Generator

Rather than creating my own templating engine, I decided to use [tera].

=> tera

Keeping similar vibes to my original site generator: any additional features is implemented through shell scripts. There are a few important features baked in with the generator and all of the very site specific features are python scripts I created.

It is inspired by [kiln]

=> kiln

~~but from all of my research it seems that the site has gone down as well as the repo that was holding it.~~

Update 2024-01-16:

It turns out that source hut was hit by a DDoS attack and kiln was part of the cross-fire. Everything seems to be back up now.

Configuration

Here is a copy of my configuration file for https.

# Specify file structure content = "content"scripts = "scripts"templates = "templates"output = "www/html"static = "static"# file types that will be rendered in content directorytemplate_types = ["md", "gmi", "html", "xml"]
# Where the output will live on the web  root = "/"# The base url name for the websiteurl = "https://benjaminja.info"# Any scripts to run before renderingpre = [
"proc/pretty-url.py",
"proc/tags.py", # tags script creates the tag system for my log"proc/pretty-url.py",
]
# Any scripts to run after renderingpost = [
"proc/proc_html.py",
]
# After rendering a file, convert it using the provided convert for each file # type[converters]
md  =  { ext = "html", cmd = ["gmi-conv", "-i", "md",  "-o", "html"] }
gmi =  { ext = "html", cmd = ["gmi-conv", "-i", "gmi", "-o", "html"] }

As an example of what a file might go through, I will show you how this file gets rendered.

Let’s say that I have the text

{% raw -%} 
> The site was rendered at {{ now | ftime(fmt="%B %e, %Y @ %r %:z") }}
{%- endraw %}

Here is the output:

The site was rendered at {{ now | ftime(fmt='%B %e, %Y @ %r %:z') }}

First, the pretty-url.py script will be run which renames this file from content/log/2024/01/13-rewriting_site_gen.md to content/log/2024/01/13-rewriting_site_gen/index.md. After that the tags.py script will be run which adds this file to the capsule and projects tags. The pretty-url.py script gets run again for any generated files, then the rendering starts.

Since this is an md file, it will get rendered. After being rendered it will be converted to html using gmi-conv -i md -o html. (There is another configuration rendering to gemini). After it is converted, the file will be passed through several templates. To be specific:

1. templates/logs/2024/_root.html which adds the title, date, and mentions.

2. templates/_root.html which adds the base html boilerplate.

We’re not done yet, finally the proc_html.py script gets run. This will use beautiful soup to find any code blocks and adds formatting to it as well as differentiates gemini links as gemini links.

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I have two configurations running. One for html and one for gemini. I only need to write my capsule once and it will be rendered to both endpoints which is pretty nice.

Making this Publicly Available

There are still a few oddities about the software that I’m not very happy with. I also want to add a bunch of documentation so that you can actually know how to use it. So I won’t be releasing my site generator until it is in better shape.

This software is probably a bit into the “You need to be a computer wiz to use this software” territory, but If I were to add some sane 3rd party scripts and some good tutorials, I think it might could be usable by an average person.

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