Publish technical blog archives

[kgodey]

Description

Adds a blog to Lektor containing old CC technical blog posts.

Old posts are currently located here and not deployed anywhere AFAIK: https://github.com/creativecommons/labs/tree/gh-pages/_posts

Remaining work

• Import remaining blog posts from the labs repo
  • Convert HTML to Markdown where appropriate
  • Include images associated with posts, (images are in the top level <year> directories).
  • Include categories (will require a change to the blog post model)
  • Fix URLs to other posts (currently points to techblog.creativecommons.org which does not exist).
• Verify that pagination works and style it appropriately.
• Show categories in UI
• Link to blog from navigation (not sure which section is the best place yet)

Future work
This work will be done in future pull requests.

• Create author pages that show all of one author's posts.
• Create category pages that show posts associated with a category.

Checklist

• My pull request has a descriptive title (not a vague title like Update index.md).
• My pull request targets the master branch of the repository.
• My commit messages follow best practices.
• I added tests for the changes I made (if applicable).
• I added or updated documentation (if applicable).
• I tried running the project locally and verified that there are no visible errors.

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[makkoncept]

Hi @kgodey, Can I work on this.
I can start working on the first task (Import remaining blog posts from the labs repo).

[kgodey]

Sure, go ahead!

[makkoncept]

@kgodey , i have made a python scipt that does the first subtask(Convert HTML to Markdown where appropriate).

For the second subtask, I want to point out that:

• some images are not present, eg screen1m.jpg, screen2m.jpg
• some images are not in the <year> directories, but in top-level img directory. eg 2386059670_9aa013cf66_m.jpg, 2385228781_b6962f4526_m.jpg

I have found most of the images in top level img directory but there might be few exceptions. So I think this directory can be used instead of year directories in the script.
What do you think?

Also just to clarify, URLs like these http://techblog.creativecommons.org/2007/05/13/more-xmp-toolkit-plugs should be changed to https://creativecommons.github.io/tech-blog-archives/more-xmp-toolkit-plugs?

[kgodey]

@makkoncept
If the images are not present, just have an empty image tag (to indicate that there once was an image. You can get them from wherever in the repo makes sense, I didn't realize there was an img/ folder too. You should probably check in both places before assuming it doesn't exist.

Images should be moved into the same directory as the contents.lr file and set up as Lektor attachments (see docs here). See the contributing-code page for an example, it links to two images that are in the same folder.

[makkoncept]

@kgodey, will the default syntax of markdown for the image( ![img](src) ) not work? The script is able to parse the img tag, and convert it to this syntax.

Also just to clarify, URLs like these http://techblog.creativecommons.org/2007/05/13/more-xmp-toolkit-plugs should be changed to https://creativecommons.github.io/tech-blog-archives/more-xmp-toolkit-plugs?

[kgodey]

@makkoncept I'm not sure which folder the images are served from, you can try it and see if it works. I think it's better to do it in a way that's idiomatic in Lektor.

[makkoncept]

@kgodey Can you please tell me how to include categories?
Do we have to do something like this?

title: wiki.creativecommons.org skin available
---
categories: mediawiki, releases, software
---
author: nathan
---
body:

[kgodey]

You have to add a field to the blog post model (see /models/blog-post.ini) For now, just add the categories as a single comma separated field, I'll make a separate ticket for actually implementing category pages (the Lektor guide is here, for reference: https://www.getlektor.com/docs/guides/categories/)

[makkoncept]

@kgodey I have updated the script.
Can you test it locally?
Put it in root with _posts and img directories. It needs bs4 and html2text packages .
The script will make a tech-blog-archives directory.

[kgodey]

@makkoncept tested and looks good 👍. However the most recent post is on 2012-07-11 and I know there are blog posts up to 2014 in the original repo. Could you make sure all blog posts and images are ported over (maybe count them pre-transformation and post-transformation independently and make sure they match)?

[makkoncept]

ok @kgodey. Do I make a separate pull request with the all the changes?

[kgodey]

yes, please do.

[kgodey]

I'm going to merge this in to prepare for @makkoncept's PR.