A blog created with Pollen. The live site is at https://thenotepad.org. See LICENSE for copyright/licensing information.
Pollen is really optimized for books, where the sections are finite and can be prearranged according to the logic of the subject matter. It takes some extra work to put it to use as a blog, which by analogy is a loose sheaf of papers that need constant reshuffling before any use can be made of them.
Nonetheless, it works pretty well as a static blog generator. Pollen comes with no opinions about your site so there's no cruft to clean out or hack around. Pollen also gives me capabilities I can no longer live without — first among which is, it allows you to design your own markup and control how it works, forever. More thoroughly tedious rationale for my design choices will eventually go on the site’s About page.
- An RSS Feed
- Generates PDF versions of every post
- Includes “Topics”, a tagging system
- Makefile for incremental builds
- Pollen tags for perma-embedding Tweets (no JavaScript)
- Example dynamically generated
index.ptree— no need to edit every time you add a new post - Semantic line wrapping
- You'll need
xelatexinstalled and in yourPATHto generate PDFs. On Mac, installing MacTeX is easy and will do the job. - You'll need to install Racket, and the Pollen package
- Ideally you'll be on a system that can run Bash scripts and the GNU
makeutility - If you do use the included makefile to build the site, you will want to install HTML5 Tidy — or remove references to the
tidycommand in the makefile.
Next, just plop all the files from this repository in a folder.
Move my posts directory out of the way to start writing your own content, e.g. mv posts posts.example ; make spritz
Edit feed.xml.pp, filling in your own RSS metadata.
Blog posts should be named your-post-name.poly.pm and placed in the posts/ subfolder. Make sure the first line is #lang pollen and use ◊define-meta to specify the title, publish date, and, optionally, “topics” (basically tags). Check out the existing .poly.pm files in that folder for more examples of how things are done.
If you really want to customize anything, you will need to learn all about Pollen!
As in any Pollen project, you can test-run the site locally by running raco pollen start from the project folder. Then browse to http://localhost:8080 in your browser.
From the project folder, run make all to generate all the static files for the site. This is an incremental rebuild: if you’ve built the site once and since done nothing but add a new post, make all will build the HTML and PDF files for that post, rebuild the Index and Topics HTML pages, and rebuild the RSS feed. If you change any of the Racket code (.rkt files) or any of the template files, it will rebuild the HTML files for every single post, or the PDF files for every post, or both, depending on what you changed.
Use make zap to clean out all the generated pages, which will force a complete rebuild next time you do make all.
Finally, you can use make publish to push all necessary static files to your web server. See makefile for more details; you'll need to configure a couple of environment variables and you also need to be able to ssh into your server passwordlessly.