Been a while since I wrote a style sheet. Started one tonight. Not sure where I’m going with it. Feel like I want to start hand-coding a lot of my site. Using SSIs and all that. That stuff makes me feel like a wizard.
a new stylesheet always feels like a new adventure. sounds corny but it genuinely feels that way!
That’s why I do mine the way I do.
The challenge is generating an RSS feed from the hand-coded pages. Dammit Jim - I’m a librarian not a programmer! I’m actually really good with HTML and CSS, as I got in early (about 1994), but my scripting is limited and OLD. Wrote some PERL CGI scripts in about 1999.
I suppose I could dig into the way Jekyll or Hugo works and figure out how to do what I want from there.
You’re using Jekyll, right?
Have you considered using jekyll-feed
?
Oh I’m using it. I was talking about just creating everything by hand outside of Jekyll, like Gandalf would do.
Fair enough!
There’s a template in this GitHub gist, but it won’t create a full-text feed. For that you’ll want to include the http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/
XML namespace and wrap a <![CDATA[]]>
block inside a <content:encoded>
element. It’s a non-standard extension to RSS, but it works with just about every feed reader I’ve tried.
If you’re interested in how I go about it, I start by storing post metadata as UNIX shell variables in text files instead of as YAML frontmatter. That lets me create tab-separated values (TSV) files that I can then manipulate with shell utilities and awk.
I have a script that I use to massage my HTML for use when creating RSS items. I then go through the TSV files I have created to find paths for RSS entries to generate my RSS feed.
If it seems complex, it was because I had wanted to parallelize as much of the process of building my website as possible using a makefile. One of the reasons I don’t use Jekyll any longer is that it feels slow, and that seems to be because it seems to do everything sequentially.
Admittedly, Hugo’s faster, but the Hugo devs’ expectation that people will use a theme is just one of of the things that makes Hugo a pain in the ass to use. Also, I don’t want to write in Markdown; I prefer writing my own HTML like I did in 1996.
Gracias. This is sort a long term project for me. I’m not a total stranger to Linux. Might be time to get a box.
If you’re on a Mac you can install all of the tools you might use on Linux with homebrew. That’s what I did.
Funny. I have installed it when I installed Jekyll. I just didnt’ really know what it was. There is so much I need to catch up on.
Don’t worry. You’ve got this.