Disclaimer: One, this documentation is out of date, two, I've made this for my own purposes so it's very suited to that, it likely won't work, out of the box, just like you want it to, or be very adaptable. But! Have a look if ya want, fork and change it all up!
A static site generator with these goals:
- Written in the pure, classic and elegant language JavaScript, using Node.js.
- Use Handlebars for templating.
- Includes paginated post feed!
- RSS
- Less mattery front-matter. Meta data extracted from post headings allowing markdown files to be free from traditional front-matter.
|_BlogFolder
|_partials (optional)
-pagination.html (optional)
-header.html
-footer.html
|_templates
-page.html
-blog.html
-feed.html
|_content (required)
|_assets (optional)
|_css
|_js
|_img
|_blog
-blog-post.md
-moar-post.md
|_about.md
opts = {
source: "./content",
output: "./site",
templateDir: "./templates",
partialsDir: "./partials",
pagination: 4,
templates: {
blog: 'blog/*',
about: 'about.md',
feed: 'page/*'
},
feed: {
postsDir: './content/blog',
urlPrefix: 'blog',
site: {
url: 'http://example.org',
title: 'My Site',
description: 'A site for stuff, ya know?',
imageUrl: 'http://example.org/image.png',
author: 'meauthor',
}
}
}
source
,output
,templateDir
are the locations for the starting content, templates and your build.partialsDir
is optional and is for Handlebars template partialstemplates
is an object designating what templates to use on what pages. You can list directories or individual files in an array.pagination
is how many posts per page to show on post feed pages. If you don't include this, it defaults to 5.feed
is not optional, you must provide this information for generating the RSS
- Requires Node.js and NPM (which comes with .pkg and .msi downloads of Node.js)
- You'll install the
balrog
module globally, then run it from the command line within a directory set up in the style diagramed above.
npm install -g balrog
- Set up file structure as described above
- You can copy the base files from the template branch
- Create
config.JSON
- Make sure you include and use the following as described:
When creating a blog feed page template (the one that shows x (pagination number) of posts per page), your template must look like this:
{{#posts}}
{{{content.content}}}
{{/posts}}
{{> pagination}}
The "Previous/Next" links are added to the bottom of blog feeds via a Handlebars Partial template:
<div class="turn-page">
<a class="turn-previous" href="{{previous}}">Previous</a>
<a class="turn-next" href="{{next}}">Next</a>
</div>
Additionally, the class end-of-pages
is applied when there is not a previous or next page. If you do not include a partials directory, it will default to generating 1 blog post feed page with all posts.
Meta data is generated through the first 4 lines of each blog post. It doesn't matter how you style them, so long as your first 4 lines are in this order:
# Title
### Author
#### Date
##### Tags, tags, tags
Hi this is a post. So pancake.
TO DO An extension to not do this if you wish not to.
Create general non-blog pages (such as an About page) by placing the .md file in the /contents
directory. You can assign it a template in the config.json
From within your soon-to-be Balrog'd directory, run:
balrog
Serve up the site locally on a random port:
balrog -serve
Create a new repository on GitHub and place all the contents of your Balrog generated /site
directory on a branch named gh-pages
. Bam, website! You can find it at: yourgithubname.github.io/reponame