blog.chrislewis.me.uk

Time to roll my own. So long, WordPress!

Post format

Blog posts are written in a simplified Markdown format in posts. These are later converted into JSON objects that can be rendered as components:

• First line is the title.

• Second line is the date and time in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format.

• This line is a comma-separated list of tags.

• Body comes afer line containing '---'.

• Each paragraph is treated as a block of text (double newline break).

• Images ![desc](path) are converted to <img>.

• Headings are standard header levels with a space beween hash and text.

• Links [desc](url) are converted to <a>.

• Lines starting with '- ' are converted to bullet lists using tables.

• Code highlighting uses Markdown triple backticks followed by the language name.

Building the blog

All posts in posts are built using their metadata to create component lists that are rendered on the page, and are placed in assets/rendered.

./pipeline/build-site.sh

The navigation of months per year is built during tools/buildPosts.js as assets/history.json.

After building, opening index.html and selecting a year and month will show all the posts from assets/history.json referring to their rendered components which can then be displayed.

The chosen month or post is reflected in the query for permalinking.

Deployment

Currently deployed as a S3 website from bucket, with a CloudFront distribution serving HTTPS with a ACM certificate. The deployment is done with a combination of Terraform and AWS CLI.

Automated deployment

The site is deployed by GitHub actions when a new commit is pushed to the master branch.

Manual deployment

Alternatively, it can be syncronized and invalidated with an AWS IAM User with S3 and CloudFront permissions allowed:

export AWS_PROFILE=...

./pipeline/deploy.sh

You may need to first install the required terraform version:

cd terraform

tfswitch

Import from WordPress

No longer used - posts already imported to be modified instead of the originals

1. Copy xml from WordPress to assets/export.

2. Run tools/importWordpressXml.js to convert to a list of posts in assets/import/posts.json:

node tools/importWordpressXml.js assets/export/tryworkfinallycode.wordpress.2020-06-13.001.xml

The format of the import is as follows:

[
  {
    "id": "2",
    "title": "Here it is",
    "link": "https://ninedof.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/here-it-is/",
    "pubDate": "Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:16:22 +0000",
    "postDate": "2013-03-21 15:16:22",
    "body": "<p>So I've finally started that blog idea I'd had my eye on for a while ..."
  },
  ...
]

3. Run tools/createWordpressMarkdown.js to create imported cleaned-up Markdown files, which should be later tidied up into proper posts files (see above). Each file placed in posts/ will have substitutions made to ease the transition.

node tools/createWordpressMarkdown.js

Then, build as usual.