Robot Has No Heart

Xavier Shay blogs here

A robot that does not have a heart

Migrating Enki to Jekyll

I just converted this blog from a dynamic Enki site to a static Jekyll one. I wanted to get rid of the comments, add SSL, and not have to upgrade Rails so often. I prefer composing locally also.

First, I exported all of the posts to lesstile templates using a rake task.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

task :export_posts => :environment do
  Post.find_each do |post|
    filename = "%s-%s.lesstile" % [
      post.published_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"),
      post.slug
    ]

    dir = "_posts"
    yaml_sep = "---"

    puts filename

    body = <<-EOS
#{yaml_sep}
layout: post
title:  #{post.title.inspect}
date:   #{post.published_at.strftime("%F %T %:z")}
tags:   #{post.tags.map {|x| x.name.downcase }.sort.inspect}
#{yaml_sep}
{% raw %}
#{post.body}
{% endraw %}
    EOS

    File.write(File.join(dir, filename), body)
  end
end

Lesstile is a wrapper around Textile that provides some extra functionality, so a custom converter is also needed. Put the following in _plugins/lesstile.rb (with associated additions to your Gemfile):

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28

require 'lesstile'
require 'coderay'
require 'RedCloth'

module Jekyll
  class LesstileConverter < Converter
    safe true
    priority :low

    def matches(ext)
      ext =~ /^\.lesstile$/i
    end

    def output_ext(ext)
      ".html"
    end

    def convert(content)
      Lesstile.format_as_xhtml(
        content,
        :text_formatter => lambda {|text|
          RedCloth.new(CGI::unescapeHTML(text)).to_html
        },
        :code_formatter => Lesstile::CodeRayFormatter
      )
    end
  end
end

The permalink configuration option needs to be set to match existing URLs, and to create the tag pages, use the jekyll-archives plugin.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

permalink: "/:year/:month/:day/:title/"

assets:
  digest: true

"jekyll-archives":
  enabled:
    - tags
  layout: 'tag'
  permalinks:
    tag: '/:name/'

gems:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-assets
  - jekyll-archives

For the archives page, use an empty archives.md in the root directory with a custom layout:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

{% include head.html %}
{% assign last_month = nil %}
<ul>
{% for post in site.posts %}
  {% assign current_month = post.date | date: '%B %Y' %}
  {% if current_month != last_month %}
    </ul>
    <h3>{{ current_month }}</h3>
    <ul>
  {% endif %}

  <li>
    <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>

    {% if post.tags != empty %}
    ({% for tag in post.tags %}<a href='/{{ tag }}'>{{ tag }}</a>{% if forloop.last %}{% else %}, {% endif %}{% endfor %})
    {% endif %}
  </li>

  {% assign last_month = current_month %}
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% include footer.html %}

For a full example, including a recommended set of layouts and includes, see the new sources for this site.

A pretty flower Another pretty flower