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% More Modest % blogs, lolz, #pinned % 2014-08-16

A few days ago, I discovered discount, a very nice markdown processing tool. It wasn’t until I downloaded the source and investigated it a bit though that I saw it’s potential!

See, I’m a fan of static blogs, but I’ve never been one to go download one of the many jekyll like things that exist out there. Why? Quite frankly, I find them to be rather ridiculous. Lots of random dependencies, the need for a specific version of Ruby, or whatever the jekyll variant is written in, etc.

This blog was once powered by a 30 line Python script. It was then powered by modest, which (I think) predates jekyll, and is about 500 lines of unfinished Python and had way more features than I ever cared to even bother using.

So, when I encountered the theme utility in the discount source tree, I saw a great opportunity to solve blogging once and for all! Never again will you need to worry about whether or not your Ruby is compatible with the one on your VPS, or whether that random templating engine is installed somewhere correctly.

This blog is now “powered” by a Makefile, and the little utility from discount called theme that I found. The Makefile is less than 100 lines of GNU make and uses Unix utilities that you already have on your box. I use awk, for instance, to munge a bit of text, sort to well, sort entries by date, head and tail to select lines out of the markdown files–in fact, it’s just unix.

And this thing is fast, has a lot of features, and I’m going to proclaim that it’s much better than your blog engine, in nearly every single way. Just look at all these features!

• Fast compilation times – make knows how to build only the things that need to be built! Amazing!
• Static – get Slashdotted¹ over and over, your VPS won’t blink!
• Almost completely depdendency free – just get discount, you almost certainly have the rest already!
• Pages – cause every blog has an about page!
• Templates – everyone needs a design!
• Atom Feeds – I believe in syndication!
• Markdown – forget HTML!
• An index – just one, the front page!
• Agnostic of version control – bring your own!
• Agnostic of file layout – just configure it in the Makefile!

So, then, umm, how did I “upgrade” from the old Modest?

for n in `egrep '[pP]ublished: False' *.txt | cut -f1 -d:`; do
   mv $n $n.unpublished
done

sed -i 's/^[Tt]itle: //' *.txt
sed -i 's/^[Tt]ags: //' *.txt
sed -i 's/^[Dd]ate: //' *.txt

sed -i 's/^[pP]ublished: True$//' *.txt
sed -i 's/^[cC]omments: True$//' *.txt

for n in *.txt; do
    rawlineno=$(grep -n '^---$' $n | cut -d ':' -f1)
    lineno=`expr $rawlineno - 1`
    echo $rawlineno ":" $lineno
    OLDIFS=$IFS
    IFS=$'\n'

    for line in `head -n $lineno $n`; do
        sed -i "s|$line|% &|" $n
    done
    IFS=$OLDIFS
done

for n in `ls *.txt`; do
    sed -i 's/^---$//' $n
    sed -i 's/^$//' $n
    output=${n%%.txt}.md
    ./html2text.py $n > $output
done

Discount has this nice little feature which allows you to use pandoc headers in your markdown files. theme knows how to read those fields, and gives them names. Since Modest worked via a similar mechanism, the above shell script more or less turns the old headers into the new ones. I had to do a little manual work on some posts which had different header orderings.

Because I’m a fool, Modest made me author blog posts in HTML, which gave me flexibility, but was tedious. I used Aaron Schwartz’s html2text script to convert that HTML into Markdown. There’s a few things that still need cleanup–mostly around footnotes, but whatever. No one reads this blog anyway!