The goal was to be able to easily create and modify blog entries without worrying about writing any HTML code. I have created a workflow that allows me to just write in the markdown format. I achieved this by using a Makefile and a python script.
PANDOCFLAGSHTML = \
--table-of-contents \
--toc-depth=4 \
--from=makrdown+markdown_in_html_blocks+bracketed_spans \
--template=../pandoc/blog_template.html
# a wildcard that searches recursively
rwildcard = $(wildcard $1$2) $(foreach d,$(wildcard $1*),$(call rwildcard,$d/,$2))
# find all markdown files
MARKDOWN := $(call rwildcard,./,*.md)
HTML = $(MARKDOWN:.md=.html)
all: $(HTML)
%.html: %.md
@echo $@
pandoc $< -o $@ $(PANDOCFLAGSHTML)
python newBlogEntry.py $(@D)
clean:
rm $(HTML)
I am using pandoc to convert markdown to html.
A simple command to do this conversion would be:
$ pandoc -f markdown -t html markdownfile.md
-f/--from
is a flag that specifies what file type we are starting from, and -t/--to
is the file type we are converting to.
Another way to do it is with the -o
flag:
$ pandoc inputfile.md -o outputfile.html
-o/--output
specifies the output file. In this example, we are specifying that we want to output to a file called outputfile.html
. Pandoc is smart enough to look at the extensions of the input and output files to know what we are converting from and to.
Now that we understand what pandoc does, I can explain that all this Makefile does is look for every markdown file in the subdirectories and turns them into html. The PANDOCFLAGSHTML
variable contains all the flags I am using with the pandoc command.
So in the end it is running something like this:
$ pandoc markdownFile/markdownFile.md -o markdownFile/markdownFile.html --table-of-contents --toc-depth=4 --from=markdown+markdown_in_html_blocks+bracketed_spans --metadata-file=../pandoc/metadata.yaml --template=../pandoc/blog_template.html -V mainfont="DejaVu Serif" -V monofont="DejaVu Sans Mono"
--table-of-contents
: Outputs the html file with a table of contents.
Here are a list of blogs that I took inspiration from.
- https://timrodenbroeker.de/category/all/