Postcraft

#:postcraft is an application of #:transmissions which I put while figuring out #:transmissions. It's a static site builder, you're looking at its product. Right now it's a crufty, fragile, seriously over-engineered and breathtakingly inefficient static site builder. But that's not a problem. Things should be coupled loosely enough that I can incrementally improve all this with minimal breakage along the way. Should be.

The fact that I've messed up the CSS somewhere but have no idea where suggests there is a problem.

I'm only using HTML/CSS/Vanilla JS for presentation, but it's all a bit of a lump right now. I need to tease out the bits that are actually in use, relocate and organise them in a way that I can work on them in isolation.

Ew. The current filesystem setup really is a shambles.

Ok, the root of this site when published locally is :

/home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/public/home
...
ls
css  entries  fonts  index.html  js  media  static

In index.html is :

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/fonts.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/grid-columns.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" />

Hmmm. I put the danny.ayers.name material under .../postcraft/ because it's been acting as test data. This might be a good time to move it somewhere more production-like. Ok, new repo : https://github.com/danja/danny.ayers.name

As a static site builder #:postcraft currently :

  • copies a bunch of stuff from A -> B
  • walks dirs transforming markdown -> html
  • templates the individual entry pages
  • templates index.html

I'd better remind myself of the #:postcraft #:transmission and the manifest I'm using for danny.ayers.name. Might as well make copies for future ref. It seems I'm using https://danny.ayers.name/static/ as the base for material that should be published verbatim. The word static isn't quite right, but I guess it fits ok with not-quite-right conventions.

There's a bit of chicken & egg here, the documentation for #:transmissions will be published using #:transmissions. Short version :

  • A #:transmissions application is defined by its -
    • transmissions, the topology of the processing pipelines
    • configuration, the settings for the nodes in the pipelines, which are processors

The #:postcraft application has :

  • transmissions.ttl
  • config.ttl
  • about.md - the applications should mostly be self-documenting in the Turtle files (together with the processor signatures), but I've included these for out-of-band info, notes-to-self. I'll probably add an about.ttl later, hints for the machines.

When a #:transmissions application is invoked, a target may be provided for instance-specific data. In this case, there's a manifest.ttl on the filesystem with the necessary for building the danny.ayers.name site.

I've a huge amount of refactoring & tweaking to do around #:transmissions. Here the separation of concerns between config & manifest isn't very clean, vocab clunky. But I'm happy to call this fundamental structure done for now. There are a bunch of new features I plan to implement in the near future. But I've got to be careful about priorities (this is what I need #:farelo, kind-of project management tooling, also in-progress).

Dogwalk... ...where was I?

Oh yeah, sources & destinations of things. First, I want another set of copies of those files. I should be more systematic and use for-purpose version control better. Showing my age here, I predate VCS. But simply making a copy of the application dir and calling it postcraft-previous works pragmatically.

trans is simply symlinked to a run.js, partial prep for something I dare put on the $PATH. postcraft the application here appears in #:transmissions' source tree (it doesn't have to, I'm following a strategy of minimising ties to the filesystem as I go along, but there's no rush to move it). The target is given as a relative path, where to look for a manifest.ttl.

I've slipped into my own little convention for locating repos on these Ubuntu machines :

 /home/danny/github-danny
 /home/danny/github-other

So most of the time when I'm coding I use ~/github-danny as a temporary home.

Now how am I expressing the paths in config.ttl?

t:copyStatic a trm:ServiceConfig ;
    trm:key t:staticCopy ;
    trm:source "content-static" ;
    trm:destination "public/home/static" .

And where does that wind up using when it's run?

Ok, I need that about.md note-to-self, give it a little tweak :

cd ~/github-danny/transmissions

./trans postcraft ../postcraft/danny.ayers.name | grep content-static

Ah. On my to-do list is swapping the hacky logger that's in #:transmissions now for a proper one, and have the thing support a --verbose flag. Not a biggy, I can force the log level to debug inside whichever processor is doing the copy. Ok, here it is in

### static dirs
:cp10 a :FileCopy ;
    trm:configKey :staticCopy .

I've only just added support for processors (implemented as ES modules) outside of the #:transmissions source tree, so this'll be:

src/processors/fs/FileCopy.js

Pop in logger.setLogLevel("debug"), rerun the application+grep,

Copying directory from /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/content-static to /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/public/home/static

It said that twice. Odd, but not a worry for today.

Grr. Some jobs I need to do before it goes dark. I'll just check what happens when I tweak the path :

t:copyStatic a trm:ServiceConfig ;
    trm:key t:staticCopy ;
    trm:source "content-static" ;
    trm:destination "../../danny.ayers.name/static" .

./trans postcraft ../postcraft/danny.ayers.name | grep content-static

...
Copying directory: /home/danny/github-danny/postcraft/danny.ayers.name/content-static to /home/danny/github-danny/danny.ayers.name/static

Good-o, just as I'd hoped.

So now I'll just flip the path back, type p on my local machine - a script which will run the above, then push the result up to the server. Next I ssh into the server, another little script :

cd /home/github-danny
./pull-all.sh

And this here should be live.

Break time.

Postcraft