Custom Blog Engine

This repository houses a simple static blog engine that processes Markdown files, applies a templating system, and spits out a static blog in a directory. The engine is based on the following stack:

• Python 3.6
  • docopt: Maybe my favorite Python package
  • Mako: Simple templating
  • Markdown: Venerable Python Markdown implementation

This stack is simple to initialize:

> conda create -n python36 python=3.6 virtualenv
> source activate python36
> virtualenv venv
> source venv/bin/activate
> pip install docopt Mako Markdown

I wanted to use a fast C-based parser, e.g., cmark-gfm (link), but syntax highlighting looked difficult to implement without extra JavaScript libraries. Python Markdown is reasonably quick and includes a number of Markdown extensions (code highlighting, smart quotes, footnotes) out of the box.

Design Requirements

1. Render Markdown as HTML via simple templates.
2. Be fast about it.
3. Allow code syntax highlighting.
4. Include MathJax or equivalent.

Current Status & To-Do List

The engine works and already generates my blog.

Future upgrades and extensions:

• Add better handling/factoring of configuration metadata.
  This could be handled by testing for a dotfile or a local config file.

• Experiment with draft posts.
  This might be best implemented as a YAML post flag such that the engine renders the HTML but does not include the post in any indexes (e.g., index.html, rss.xml, feed.json).

• Add better factoring of posts and template logic.

• Add logging and timing to the page generation.

• Add site generation and upload scripts to the repository.

• Add logic to convert relative links to full ones fir the index page and feeds.