Creating A Static HTML Blog Generator: Transform Your Plain Text Into A Website

Long before you write your stories, and poems, you have to create a command that converts your text to a web page.

If not, then somebody else will tell you how to format everything, and their view of blobbing is unlikely to match yours.

F-ooo-r example, I like making audio blogs, which are like radio, and podcasts, and close enough to videos.

And that comes with a lot of custom little considerations, for example compression can squeeze your blog into lots of free hosting sites.

And give you a unique AM radio feel, or even vintage record player talking machine spin that demands black & white photos.

You can experiment with generative art to convert audio and still photos, to video and upload a copy of your blog to video sites.

And add a little talking head, into the corner of the video, in the age of AI you can generate a different character for each video.

It is possible to make a talking cat that has a correctly animated mouth, or a simpler more random Max Headroom like style creature.

Where you don’t need to process the audio, to make the mouth mover correctly.

The most important thing about making your own command, is that you put your foot into learning new things.

And that because your blog command is important to you, all the things you learn will be interesting, relevant, and will stick.

For example, until you realize how cool this is, you may have no need to try to figure out how Linux commands work.

And they are very easy, and parsing command line arguments, is as run as checking if the argv item starts with a hyphen or two.

If so, then you create a new popery on your object, is not, then it is a value for the property you previously created.

I am upgrading my own blog, and I made a really cool discovery last week, really a huge blogging breakthrough for me.

But before we discuss it, you have to understand how you save the data, you actually only need files and directories.

Save each post in a folder marked with a number, such as post-0001, post-0002, post-0003.

And inside put in cover.jpg for your main image or thumbnail, post.md or post.txt for your text, audio.mp3 and config.json.

Config.json keeps some structured data for you, such as title post tags, date published, and whether it is a draft or not.

Then you just read contents of your folder, load up the json, convert text to html and copy your audio and image.

I used to think that you also had to create the website html files here, but this is what my discovery was about.

Transforming your files, and creating the pages that users browse, are two different programs.

The first part converts your post-000-number files to entries in a permalink folder.

And the second one creates html files, with many posts per page, and a previous page of posts and next page of posts button pager thingie.

Dividing your static HTML blog generator in two parts, transform posts, and make browsable pages makes it easy to reason about.

And if any of this sounds confusing, please, please, know, that AI can program everything for you.

I recommend you ask the minimalist lightweight version, that is a wonderful way to learn JavaScript.

AI will show you how to open and close files, and work with the file system.

How to use SQLlite to keep track of modification dates, to that you don’t have to regenerate the same posts.

And of course you get to learn how to use templating engines, I recommend JavaScript template string, no need for template engines or EJS.

As you publish your blog you will learn about domain name registration, and talk to AI about git and free git repository hosting.

Remember, keep your post directory transformation, separate, from presentation pages that present many posts per page.

And consider using a classless CSS framework, where AI writes HTML in a certain way, and it gets automatically decorated.

If you don’t know what to make your blog about, make it about learning JavaScript.

Or, write a blog about your blog, like I am doing right now.

My AI created such a tiny litte blog engine for you, ask your AI how to install nodejs and use and customize it.