speakwrite

A minimal static blog renderer and dev server.

You won't want this. But, it's what I use for confidentialinterval.com.

To run the server locally

To run the renderer as a dev server with auto-reload on code, content, or template changes:

CONTENT_DIR=/path/to/content THEME_DIR=/path/to/theme ./dev/watch.sh

To render into a directory

CONTENT_DIR=/path/to/content \
  THEME_DIR=/path/to/theme \
  PUBLIC_URL=http://website.url \
  OUTPUT_DIR=/path/to/html/output \
  build/speakwrite render

Development

Build and run tests with:

make

How it works: overview

speakwrite expects two directories: a CONTENT_DIR and a THEME_DIR.

CONTENT_DIR contains pages and posts:

content/
  posts/
    metadata.json               (Optional) metadata about the entire post series.
    {ISO_8601}-{POST_NAME}/     Articles. Mapped to /posts/{SERIES_NAME}/{POST_NAME}/
      index.md                  Article text.
      metadata.json             (Optional) metadata about this post.
    {SERIES_NAME}/
      metadata.json             (Optional) metadata about this named series.
      {ISO_8601}-{POST_NAME}/   Articles in a series. Mapped to /posts/{SERIES_NAME}/{POST_NAME}/
        index.md                Article text.
        metadata.json           (Optional) metadata about this post.

THEME_DIR contains static assets and templates:

theme/
  static/                       Static assets. Mapped to /static
    v/                          Versioned static assets. Cached forever.
  template/                         
    base.html                   Base HTML template.
    root.html                   Template for /
    post.html                   Template for articles under posts/

What to put in a post

Well. It's markdown, with support for footnotes and some other stuff you'll find in the code. But if you put a pandoc title block at the top that will get parsed and used. I.e.

% This is the title of the post

This is the content.

What to put in a template

To paraphrase the resource fork of an old Marathon binary:

Wouldn't you know it's all in the source code.