ipsum genera

ipsum genera is a static blog generator written in Nimrod. It's something I hacked together in a couple of days so you're mostly on your own for now if you wish to use it. Of course, I love the name ipsum genera so much that I may just be willing to make this more user friendly.

Quick manual

To set up ipsum you first need to install nimrod's nimble package manager. Once you have that installed you can run:

git clone https://github.com/dom96/ipsumgenera
cd ipsumgenera
nimble install

This will compile ipsum and copy it to your $nimbleDir/bin/ directory. Add this directory to your $PATH environment variable so you can run ipsum anywhere. In the future if you need to update your ipsum version you will need to refresh that checkout and run nimble install again to overwrite your current copy.

Now, go to the directory of your choice for storing your own website and create the structure to hold your content:

cd ~/projects
mkdir -p super_website/articles
mkdir -p super_website/static
mkdir -p super_website/layouts
cd super_website

Put articles in the articles folder with metadata similar to jekyll's:

---
title: "GTK+: I love GTK and here is why."
date: 2013-08-18 23:03
tags: Nimrod, GTK
---

Save the article as: 2013-08-18-gtk-plus-i-love-gtk-and-here-is-why.rst, or something else, the filename doesn't really matter, ipsum does not care as long as they have an rst extension. All other extension files are ignored.

Put static files in the static folder. If the file ends in .rst it has to have metadata like a normal article, but the generated html will keep the relative path instead of getting a generated one from the date+title. If the file doesn't end in .rst, it will simply be copied to the output website directoy.

You then need to create some layouts and put them into the layouts folder. You will need the following layouts:

• article.html -- Template for an article.
• static.html -- Template for a static file.
• default.html -- Template for the index.html page, this includes the article list.
• tag.html -- Template for the specific tag page, this will include a list of articles belonging to a certain tag.

Layouts are simply html templates, ipsum will replace a couple of specific strings in the html templates when it's generating your blog. The format of these strings is ${key}, and the supported keys are:

• ${body} -- In default.html this is the article list, in article.html this will be the actual article text.
• ${title} -- Article title in article.html, otherwise the blog title from ipsum.ini.
• ${date} or ${pubDate} -- Article publication date in article.html extracted from the metadata. The date has to be in format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm.
• ${modDate} -- Article modification date in article.html extracted from the metadata, or if not available from the file's last modification timestamp.
• ${prefix} -- The path to the root in article.html only.
• ${tag} -- The tag name, tag.html only.

Where article.html is mentioned, the same applies for static.html. You will also need to create an ipsum.ini file, the file should contain the following information:

title  = "Blog title here"
url    = "http://this.blog.me"
author = "Your Name"

The information from this config is also available in your templates, the key names match the names in the config file. Additional options you can add to the ipsum.ini file:

• numRssEntries - Integer with the maximum number of generated entries in the rss feed. If you don't specify a value for this, the value 10 will be used by default.

Once you're done with the setup, simply execute ipsum and your blog should be generated before you can even blink!

Metadata reference

• title - Article title.
• date or pubDate - Date the article was written.
• modDate - Specifies a posterior date the article was updated. If you don't specify this tag, it will be filled in with the file's last modification timestamp.
• tags - Tags belonging to the article.
• draft - If true article will not be generated.

License

MIT license.