The Idea Of Makefile Blog

Nowadays, even the simplest static website generator are overly complicated and requires too much effort to learn and customize. A possible solution to this problem was use of easily accessible tools -if not already shipped with distro- with the power of GNU Make. First think I did was searching similar implementations with a makefile but I had no luck except for some generators which basicly call a script already written in a high level language and it lacked the extensibility theme wise.

Structure

The basic structure involving in the Makefile Blog is templating through envsubst included in gettext package. Various information including author, creation time and update time is read by stat from filesystem metadata which might not work on some filesystems or configurations but tested on ext4 and ntfs. The posts are written in html and should be saved under posts directory with no extension. The rationale behind the choice of html over markdown is because html is native language of the web and use of anything else is just waste of computation in my opinion since it requires additional dependency to a md to html converter such as pandoc. Static files are stationed under posts/static folder and recursively copied to build/static folder among with any css file under current template folder. So inner structure of static files are not defined but preffered use can be seen in the folder tree.

.
|-- makefile
|-- posts
|   |-- Hello_World
|   |-- Second_Post
|   |-- The_Idea_Of_Makefile_Blog
|   `-- static
|       `-- 1
|           `-- meme.jpg
`-- templates
    `-- default
        |-- RSS.xml
        |-- RSS_item.xml
        |-- index.html
        |-- page.html
        |-- post.html
        |-- post_card.html
        `-- post_index_card.html

5 directories, 12 files

As seen on the folder tree, name of the post files are also title for the blog posts but underscores which then gets replaced used instead of spaces. The way Make interprets spaces is interesting and usually breaks stuff.

Configuration

Configuring the makefile blog is easy. Variables in the makefile can be either manually modified or given through environment. Some fields you may want to change as following:

BLOGNAME = My First Blog
BLOGDESC = hey
TEMPLATE = default
BLOGROOT = 
# You may set blogroot your domain for non relative urls.
# Also dont put / at the end

The blogroot can be blank if the blog is on the root of the domain. If you have placed your blog under a directory named blog, you may set BLOGROOT variable to /blog. If you need absolute urls for some reason, you may set BLOGROOT variable to your domain such as https://www.example.com. Further configuration available in the makefile

Templating

Any template under templates directory can be choosen by editing the makefile or by giving the related environment variable as make TEMPLATE=tmpname. The default template is an example to show minimum set of files required for a template. Every template must have these files to satisfy requirements for all targets available in the makefile. The template files use environment variables set by makefile during the building process similar to ${TEMPLATE_POST_DATE_UPDATED} or ${TEMPLATE_POST_AUTHOR} to show content.

Result

The makefile blog is as simple as creating a text file mixed with html tags under ./posts and running make. I have tested the default template on various browsers including the links. The default template is mostly usable in links and no major problem is visible. Since this is a minimal template, no external css file were used. The template is more or less compatible with mobile devices as far as my non-extensive tests. Overall compatibility is okay across devices.

P.S: The project can be found at Github, this blog itself is made with makefile blog.

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  last updated 2020-06-24 21:02:12 by met                           
                                                                    
  The meme about this post. Nowadays, even the simplest static       
  website generator are overly complicated and requires too much    
  effort to learn and customize. A possible solution to this        
  problem was use of easily accessible -if not already shipped      
  with distro- tools with the power of GNU Make. First think I      
  did was searching similar implementations with a makefile but I   
  had no luck except for some generators which basicly call a       
  script already written in a high level language and it lacked     
  the extensibility theme wise.                                     
file:///home/met/Desktop/blog/build/