homepage

A simple POSIX shell script that helps me maintain my homepage.

Purpose

I write all articles on my homepage in Markdown. Then I convert them to HTML. When I have edited an existing article, I compare the new version with the old (published) version. Finally, I publish my new/updated article by copying it to the right (sub)folder of my homepage (which is mounted via sshfs).

For all these tasks I use homepage:

• homepage convert my-article.md
• homepage compare my-article.html
• homepage publish my-article.html

Configuration

The configuration is read from ~/.config/homepage/config if available or else from config in the homepage script directory.

Set all variables in your copy (or the original otherwise) to your needs.

When you use homepage convert FILE, the created HTML output is pasted into an HTML template which contains HTML metadata, a header and a footer, links a CSS file and possibly JavaScript files.

The path to the HTML template is set in the configuration file (TEMPLATE=). Otherwise, homepage searches for TEMPLATE.html in

1. the current working directory,
2. the root directory of the local copy of the homepage ($LOCAL),
3. $HOME/.config/homepage/
4. in the directory of the homepage script.

homepage convert calls md2html (→mity/md4c) which needs to be in your PATH.

Markdown metadata

homepage convert expects Markdown files that start with a comment/header like this:

[//]: # (
Title: st as an Alacritty replacement
Description: How to configure st coming from Alacritty
Date: 2021-08-01
Update: 2022-12-17
)

• Title: Used as HTML title, Open Graph protocol title and H1 header. The OG title is restricted to 35 characters.
• Description: Used as HTML metadata and Open Graph description. The latter is restricted to 65 characters.
• Date: Date of creation, inserted as first paragraph (depending on the template). If missing, current (conversion) date is used.
• Update: Date of last modification, inserted next to the date of creation (depending on the template). Optional.

Since the default template uses the H1 header for the article title, I use only H2 to H6 in my Markdown files.

Custom tag attributes

When a Markdown file contains a comment like this:

<!-- class="number-table striped-table" -->

… homepage convert will add these attributes to the following tag in the resulting HTML file.