Site progress

Its 2022 now, crazy how quickly last year flew by.

I’ve recently made a couple changes to the site so I thought I’d make a post listing them:

RSS should work nicer in readers
Added a theme toggle button, clicking it will swap between dark and light mode
Added indent toggle. Some people prefer left align while others prefer center align.
Removed dithering. Caused issues with light theme and not worth the extra bandwidth for dithered images.

So far I’m really enjoying working on this site. It’s making me appreciate how much I can do without libraries. This sites content is still built using a shell script however I might try write either a C or Rust program to manage drafts and all that jazz.

RSS was a fun challenge btw. It’s really hard to find any guides online so I basically had to follow the RFC. Here’s the script I use to generate my feed:

# Create RSS feed
RSS_ITEMS=()
echo "Creating RSS feed..."
cd "$BLOG_LOCATION"
for file in $BLOG_LOCATION/*.md; do
  NAME="$(basename "$file")"
  TITLE="$(grep "^title:" "$file" | sed 's/[^ ]* //')"
  DESCRIPTION="$(grep "^summary:" "$file" | sed 's/[^ ]* //')"
  EDIT_TIME="$(git log -1 --pretty="format:%ci" "$file" | cut -d" "  -f2)"
  PUB_DATE="$(date -d"${NAME%$FILE_PREFIX.md}" +"%a, %d %b %Y ${EDIT_TIME:-$RSS_TIME} $TIMEZONE")"
  DRAFT="$(grep "^draft:" "$file" | sed 's/[^ ]* //')"
  GUID="$(echo "$FILENAME $PUB_DATE" | md5sum | cut -f1 -d" ")"

  if [ ! "$DRAFT" ]; then
    RSS_ITEMS+=("
      <item>
        <guid isPermaLink='false'>${GUID}</guid>
        <title>${TITLE}</title>
        <link>https://${DOMAIN_NAME}/blog/${NAME%$FILE_PREFIX.md}.html</link>
        <description>${DESCRIPTION:-$TITLE}</description>
        <pubDate>${PUB_DATE}</pubDate>
      </item>
    ")
  fi
done
cd "$PARENT_PATH"
RSS_STRING=$(printf '%s' "${RSS_ITEMS[@]}" | tr -d '\n')
sed -i -e "s|RSS_PLACEHOLDER|$RSS_STRING|g" ./out/rss.xml

I’m finding shell more and more powerful as I use it more. I know I’ve still got heaps to learn though.