CorpsBlog static site generator

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This is not thoroughly tested software!

This is software hasn't been thoroughly tested. I am using it for my blog, and it works fine, but I haven't given it the kind of rigorous testing one would give a professional product.

Corpsblog

CorpsBlog is yet another static site builder. I took a look around at things like Jekyll and JBake, and after playing around I got tired of figuring out multi-layered complex software, just to make a simple blog. I figured that if I kept all of the logic in pure Kotlin/Java, I'd end up with a system that's easier to understand and extend. I have some specific needs in mind:

• I want a responsive site (one that works well with smartphones and tablets).
• I want to have photo galleries that are entirely self-contained on my site.
• I want to be able to embed video and audio clips, and have automated uploads to e.g. YouTube.
• I want to be able to design and preview entirely off-line.
• I want a completely automated upload process, designed around the idea that I might only have access to the internet every couple of weeks from an internet cafe.
• I want to host on Github pages, where I have the rest of my web sites.
• If I think of something else, I want to be able to easily extend my site generator, without referring to any external documentation or depending on anything that I might not have on my local computer.

Kotlin is a perfectly expressive language, so I saw no need to invent yet more languages on top of it, like a template language. I used the "Groovy-like builder" way of making HTML templates. I'm pretty happy with how that worked out. In retrospect, just building strings directly would have been fine, too, but it was kind of fun understanding the ins-and-outs of the builder idiom. See the Html class in src/com/jovial/lib/html/Html.kt (on Github here - startInitAssert()/endInitAssert() was interesting and subtle).

Some Design Documents

This project started out for me as an exploration of Kotlin, so the deisgn early on was rather fluid. Later I started to add some design documents; the can be found in the docs directory, which is published at http://zathras.github.io/corpsblog/.

Sample Output

A build of the test blog included in this repository can be seen at http://zathras.github.io/corpsblog/test/.

Exernal Code

I grabbed useful stuff from the following places:

• Txtmark for a nice, simple markdown processor written in Java.
• Jbake-uno for a web theme for the blog. I took the assets, and translated the relevant templates into Kotlin code by hand.
• PhotoSwipe for a JavaScript image gallery.
• The JHeader library to read JPEG EXIF data, so I can auto-rotate images in a gallery.

The Name "CorpsBlog"

My intent is to provide simple, "core" blogging functionality for my Peace Corps blog. OK, I also want to be in complete control... I tried using JBake, but in order to add automatic gallery generation, I'd have had to have waded through too many layers of integration, JRuby for asciiDoctor, and a sizeable templating framework. It seemed easier to just write my own site generator, and it's certainly more joyful.

Perhaps I'll come up with a better pun for a new name someday... Maybe something involving Mooré :-)

#Output Directory Structure

The output looks like this:

• index.html
• posts
  • 2017-06-15-first-optional-name.html
  • 2017-06-15-second-optional-name-2.html
  • 2017-07-12.html
  • pictures
    • 2017-06-15-first-optional-name-1
      • Pictures, in directories "large," "small" and "mosaic"
    • 2017-06-15-second optional-name-2
      • Pictures
    • 2017-07-12-1
      • Pictures
  • videos
    • 2017-07-12-video-0.mp4