blog

Blog at unlimited.pizza -> Only 3 at a time.

The blog is no longer 100% ephemeral. Instead it now keeps an archive in a separate folder. The archive is intended to be used as a gemlog.

How to install

npm install -g . will expose the blog binary to your CLI.

How to add a new entry

Create a .gmi gemini file.

You can add this to the blog using the following command, it will shift all entries and remove the oldest one if limit of posts is reached (defualts to 3):

blog --add path/to/blog_post.gmi

These commands will regenerate the static files. At that point you can preview your blog by serving the files on the static directory.

If you need to make corrections use:

blog --update path/to/blog_post.gmi

This will replace the latest with the contents of the path without shifting the existing entries.

You can always regenerate the static files by using

blog --generate

To publish the blog, you can select an s3 bucket and run it with:

blog --publish <bucket>

You can also publish the archive of posts as a gemlog, by passing a valid rsync target

blog --publish-archive <rsync_target>

Blog supports saving snapshots of the blog in git, and you can add and remove remotes with the following commands:

blog --add-remote <git_url>
blog --remove-remote

If a remote is present, it will be pulled before adding or updating, and pushed after it finishes. You can manually trigger this by calling

blog --sync-up
blog --sync-down

Configuring

Overriding Number of Posts

Updating the BLOG_MAX_POSTS environment variable sets the number of posts that will be kept.

Overriding Templates

You can set the BLOG_TEMPLATES_DIRECTORY to any directory you want. The tool will expect a feed.xml, index.html, and index.txt files.

These templates are then parsed with dot and exposes the following variables:

it.posts: <Array[Post]>

Post
 +id: String        // The numerical timestamp when the blog post was added.
 +createdOn: String // The UTC String of post creation date. (only feed.xml)
 +title: String     // The title of the post. (only feed.xml)
 +raw: String       // The raw gemini text of the template.
 +html: String      // The parsed html generated from the gemini.

The default is the templates directory inside the root of the blog module directory.

Overriding the location of posts.

Setting BLOG_POSTS_DIRECTORY will update where the posts are saved when added. The default is the .posts directory inside the root of the blog module directory.

Overriding the location of static files.

Setting BLOG_STATIC_DIRECTORY will update where static files are read from. This is also where the generated blog will be placed.

The default is the static directory inside the root of the blog module directory.

This directory should also contain files referenced in the templates, like css, js or images.

How to publish

The publishing method is extremely naive. It assumes you have the AWS CLI installed and configured. It will attempt to sync the static directory to the bucket.

The archive

The archive directory will have a full archive of the posts (currently as a gemlog format).

This gets updated every time you add or update a post.

Publishing with --publish will not publish the archive. Instead you should use --publish-archive, which will rsync it to the destination provided.

Debugging

If you want to know more about what's going on when blog generates data, set the environment variable NODE_DEBUG=blog. This will enable the debug messages