BlogIt

I’ve written various scripts and programs over the years for managing my personal website and blog. BlogIt is the latest incarnation taking over duties from the now venerable pttk. I’ve found increasingly there are good off the shelf options for software chores. Examples include PageFind and FlatLake. Between those two you have a turn key search system and a JSON API. FlatLake itself can turn your CommonMark front matter into an aggregated JSON API. This is particularly nice for implementing features like RSS feeds and sitemap XML files. The net result is the tools I’ve previously written for similar tasks are no longer needed. This lead to re-access what my old “blogit” tool did. Core features are as follows.

Validation and curation of front matter in my posts
A means, when ready, of copying those CommonMark documents into a blog directory tree.

BlogIt is now implemented in TypeScript and compiled to an executable via Deno. It is focused on curating the metadata around blog post and “publishing” it to a blog staging directory.

BlogIt blogging process

Use my favorite edit to create CommonMark (Markdown) documents
Use BlogIt to edit or curate the front matter and include any required code samples.
Run FlatLake to render the JSON API
Use JSON API to render the RSS feeds and sitemaps
Render the CommonMark documents to HTML
Run PageFind for search
Review the staged site and deploy when ready

BlogIt Software structure

mod.ts (used to generate the executable and to allow BlogIt to be used in other Deno+TypeScript projects)
src
- blogit.ts (holds workflows for blogit tool)
- commonMarkDoc.ts (defines a simple object made of front matter and markdown content)
- editor.ts (allows you to launch a text editor to update the field in your front matter)
- frontMatter.ts (this does the real work of validation and curation of the front matter)

Presently the prototype is less than 2000 lines of TypeScript.

Installing BlogIt

BlogIt is in the early stage of development and not currently built for distribution. You can easily compile BlogIt using Deno.

Required software

Git to clone the repository, https://github.com/rsdoiel/BlogIt
Deno >= 2.4.2

Suggested Software

CMTools >= v0.0.35 (used to generate CITATION.cff, version.ts, etc.)
Pandoc >= 3.5 (used to produce documentation in HTML)

Also helpful if you use BlogIt to generate a blog website.

PageFind, site search from HTML documents
FlatLake, JSON API from Front Matter
jq, nice for view JSON and checking for values
htmlq, like jq but for HTML documents

Steps to build

Clone the repository
Change into the repository directory
Run deno task build
Check the the help
Copy ./bin/blogit (or .\bin\blogit.exe on Windows) to someplace in your path (e.g. $HOME/.deno/bin)

git clone https://github.com/rsdoiel/BlogIt
cd BlogIt
deno task build
./bin/blogit --help
cp -v ./bin/blogit $HOME/.deno/bin/
blogit --version

Or for Windows 10/11 using PowerShell

git clone https://github.com/rsdoiel/BlogIt
cd BlogIt
deno task build
./bin/blogit --help
copy .\bin\blogit.exe $HOME\.deno\bin\
blogit --version

Author

R. S. Doiel, ORCID: 0000-0003-0900-6903

LICENSE

GNU Affero General Public License 3.0 or newer, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html#license-text