Patrick LeMieux
allisona few weeks ago I decided I wanted to be in charge of my own bookmarking infrastructure, so I exported my bookmarks from pinboard and spent the afternoon writing ~500 lines of python/html/css/bash to make a lil bespoke database manager/static site generator. pleased with the results: https://bookmarks.decontextualize.com/ (there's no link to the feed on the page, but it does support RSS! check the metadata)
basically: I have a bookmarklet that copies the current URL and any selected text as a JSON object into my clipboard, a python script that reads from the clipboard and opens vim with the data so I can edit and add tags, then adds the data to the "database" (big json file lol), and another python script that builds static pages from the database by year and tag. all held together by a bash script that uploads the files to my static host at the end of the process
I like making one-off nameless static site generators to solve problems like this! over the past few years, whenever I find myself hemming and hawing over which tool to use for whatever web publishing task, the correct answer has almost always been "just make your own one-off nameless static site generator, it's really not that difficult"
Mark Nelson@aparrish I agree! I find this a lot easier/funner than using an existing one. This might be partly because I like coding more than figuring out config of other people’s code (and it’s often an excuse to try out some new tech). But I think also because I don’t usually need the full problem solved in generality, so solving my 5% of the full problem with most stuff hardcoded is not that hard.
Carl M. Johnson@aparrish my advice to people is:
Don’t try to write the next Jekyll or Hugo. It’s a crowded market and you can’t possibly break through.
Do write a simple SSG for yourself! It’s easy, and you’ll know exactly how it works when you’re done.
Stefan@aparrish so cool!
Travis@aparrish care to share that code? I'm a long time .net developer now learning python, and I think it would be great to see and build my own version of :)
@travislaborde not planning to release it because then i'd feel the need to support it 😕 and honestly it's pretty simple. the moving parts are Jinja2 for HTML templates and the feedgen library for generating RSS
@aparrish makes sense. thanks anyway!
varx/tech@aparrish @travislaborde I struggled with whether or not to release the SSG I wrote for my blog. (After struggling, and failing, to get Hugo to do what I wanted!)
What I ended up doing was just linking to a tarball of a snapshot of the code: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2020/08/18/from-wordpress-to-ssg/ -- much harder for someone to get the impression "this is supported" if there's no git repo, no issue tracker, etc. :-)
The code is *deeply* full of references to my own site's name and structure, but it has some unusual and nice features and I'd like people to be able to use it for reference or a starting point in building their own SSGs.
@aparrish That sounds delightfully janky. :-D This is honestly what computers were made for.
Norm Tovey-Walsh@aparrish Can you say a little more about the bookmarklet? And is there any automation for the script that reads the clipboard, or is that manually triggered?
wakest likes your bugs ⁂@aparrish this looks great, damn I really sorta want to do this too
@liaizon the "CMS" for my personal website is just... pandoc converts markdown to html and then there's a bash script to scp the relevant files to my static host. clean, simple, open, sustainable
@aparrish I keep recommending pandoc to other people but haven't ever actually used it myself. Been taking all my notes in md via obsidian lately and really need to work on a pipeline to make stuff into a nice static site
@liaizon my blog (https://posts.decontextualize.com/) is also a little home-grown static site generator that does exactly this (except I use zettlr instead of obsidian). the actual process of converting markdown to html with pandoc is pretty easy imo—it's the process of making index pages etc. that is more difficult
Wiley Wiggins@wysiwyggins @aparrish getting cms advice from wiley wiggins was not in my before bed bingo cards. your site is looking lovely I just ended up playing 10 minutes of obelisk after looking through your website
Jonathan Hartley's old account@aparrish @liaizon I have a harebrained ongoing project weakly related to this, for the Linux desktop, in which double clicking on a markdown file opens it with a short Bash script, which generates a rendered HTML version, starts a background process to regenerate the HTML when the markdown changes, & opens the HTML in an existing lightweight viewer app, chosen for the nice property of auto-refreshing when the HTML updates. Upshot is a rendered view that updates when you edit the markdown.
@aparrish @liaizon I'm currently trying to generalize it, so that the same short Bash script could handle not just markdown, but also restructuredtext, or dot to SVG conversion. A two line config for each would suffice, telling it the command to use to do the conversion, and the command to start the viewer.
Greg Whitehead
Mark@aparrish This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing.
[Your Idea] ... *yoink!*
ming@aparrish literally was just thinking about how to manage my bookmarks and was about to jump to Zotero lol
this looks great! Love that it's hosted too
Adam ♿@aparrish any chance you'd open source this?
Stephen@aparrish Thanks for the inspiration. I have taken charge of my bookmarking with #Nextcloud, and while #PicoCMS for #Nextcloud isn't a #SSG, I hope to use it to display my bookmarks as elegantly as you have
Bryan Swift@aparrish I’ve thought about this a couple of times but each time ended up sticking with pinboard because of how easy it is to put bookmarks in. I’m curious how or if you solved that for yourself? Also super nice work!
Edit: saw the boost and replied before seeing the “details” follow ups. Whoops!
Tim@aparrish Can you share your code? I’ve been struggling with pinboard recently and something like this sounds perfect!
mrg@aparrish Very cool!
I’ve been thinking of doing something similar in my copious free time, only with some kind of archiving. I’d like to have a text/pdf snapshot of everything I save because the web is degrading pretty fast these days.
Right now I’m using Zotero to do that but it is a bit heavy-weight for my actual needs.
@aparrish This is fabulous, thanks for sharing. (My question deleted, you posted details!)
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