Sören Meyer-EpplerI've been meaning to move off of blogger for a long time now. Blogger as a platform has been in maintenance mode for a long time now and I don't trust it to stick around. On top of that, I'm not satisfied with its templates and publishing workflows. So I've started a little side project to write my own static side generator. It's been surprisingly fun so far.
First thing I did was dust off my rusty HTML and CSS knowledge and write a very basic template. Instead of deeply nested obfuscated trees of divs like blogger creates, I am using the simplest possible sematic HTML and the least amount of structure I can get away with. The HTML actually looks clean and is fun to edit directly.
My blog is an image heavy journal of my outdoor adventures. So I wanted to make images both easy to work with and efficient. A post shows small thumbnails inline and fetches full resolution images via loading='lazy' fetchpriority='low'. Works well. The large images are only ever retrieved when you actually click through into the lightbox full view.
Speaking of which, I figured out a way to make the lightbox work in pure HTML & CSS, without any JavaScript. JS is still used for additional convenience features (keyboard navigation, mousewheel support, swipe gestures), but if you have JS disabled, it degrades gracefully and still allows navigation through the images.
Blogger's mobile template sucks IMHO. The new site structure I'm using is responsive to the device form factor without using any additional markup. Modern CSS flex layouts actually make this very straightforward.
Now the next question is how do I transfer my content over from the existing blog to this new self hosted template? To this end I plan on writing a C++ feed reader that consumes my blog's ATOM feed and converts individual posts to Markdeep. Markdeep will be my canonical authoring language. Then another custom C++ site generator will consume those and turn them back into HTML and ATOM.
YendoloschI found #BeautifulSoup for #Python really helpful for parsing web pages. But I guess you're set on C++...
@Yendolosch I am indeed. I despise Python. And I'm trying to avoid large dependencies as much as possible, so writing most of this from scratch. Maybe I'm a masochist, but I find this relaxing. Even went so far as to write my own JPEG parser recently. Just so I could rename my image library according to the embedded EXIF information. Solutions to this obviously already exist, but understanding the low levels details was fun.