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writing_a_blogpost.md

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Writing a blogpost (like this) in pure markdown

Motivation

I wanted to write a blog for when I find useful or interesting things, mainly when programming. Not only will I have an easy way of looking them up, they might also be useful to someone that stumbles upon this blog. This blogpost here was a great help, and the the OPIG Blog inspired me to get started with blogging.

pandoc

To reduce the barrier of entry for writing a post, I wanted to be able to write in pure markdown. While there are multple ways to convert markdown to html, pandoc seems to be the most powerful and versatile. It might also be interesting to use pandoc to convert a draft of some sort to pdf via LaTeX, which pandoc is also capable of. The installation for windows is apparently not straightforward (I want to write on my surface), but installing pandoc on WSL is very easy.

parsing (almost) pure markdown

While it is possible to add header-info (like a favicon, keywords and the pagetitle) within markodown in a yaml-block, I chose to write a short python program, that will take the necessary keywords from a comment at the top and thus keep the markdown-file itself as pure as possible.

building the rest of the website

Using a template from HTML5 UP!, I created a personal website (following the steps outlined in the blog post mentioned above). With the template.md file I adjusted the CSS from the template (adding code-highlighting, ...). I then added a link to the blog via a page blog/index.html, where I will (have to manually) add the blog entries, as I write them. The complete workflow for creating a blogpost is as follows:

Steps to write a blogpost this way

  1. Copy the template.md file.
  2. Rename it with a shorttitle. (This will be displayed in the browser.)
  3. Write the blogpost, add keywords and the correct date.
  4. Switching to WSL, run python _md_to_html.py <blogpost>.md from the blog folder.
  5. Edit the blog/index.md and run python _md_to_html.py index.md
  6. Add/commit/push the new/changed files (from Windows, WSL sees a lot of files as changed).