After a long time of being stuck on Wordpress, I’ve finally switched over to a simple statically generated site hosted on S3. The Makefile itself is 50 lines of code, if you want to include the template, it’s 138. It dynamically generates an index page which acts as a table of contents for the entire blog.

The dependencies are pandoc, make, and awscli. Build and deployment to S3 is as easy as:

make
make upload

The entire source of our table of contents generation:

#!/bin/bash
CONTENT_DIR=${1}
INDEX_PATH=${CONTENT_DIR}/index.md

cat > ${INDEX_PATH} <<EOF
---
title: ${2}
---

$(for file in `find ${CONTENT_DIR}/*/ | grep md$`;
do
    title=$(cat $file | grep title: | head -n 1 | awk -F'title: ' '{ print $2 }' | sed 's/\"//g');
    date=$(cat $file | grep date: | head -n 1 | awk -F'date: ' '{ print $2 }' | sed 's/"//g');
    path=http:\/\/$(echo $file | sed 's/index\.md//');
    echo "* $date [$title]($path)";
done | sort -nrk 2)

Created using Make & bash, <a href="https://github.com/stephenbalaban/stephenbalaban.com">source available here</a>.

Last Updated: $(date).
EOF

The entire source of the html from markdown generation, media copying functionality, and S3 deployment:

TEMPLATE := template.html
CONTENT_DIR := stephenbalaban.com
SITE_TITLE := Stephen Balaban\'s blog
OUTPUT_DIR := output/

MARKDOWN_FILES := $(wildcard $(CONTENT_DIR)/*/*.md) $(wildcard $(CONTENT_DIR)/*.md)
DOCS = $(MARKDOWN_FILES:.md=.html)

.DEFAULT_GOAL := all
.PHONY : maketoc
.PHONY : images

toc :
    ./generate_index.sh $(CONTENT_DIR) "$(SITE_TITLE)"

all : toc $(DOCS) images

%.html : %.md
    mkdir -p output/$(shell dirname $<)
    pandoc --template=$(TEMPLATE) -s -o $(OUTPUT_DIR)/$(@) $<

images:
    rsync --relative -a $(CONTENT_DIR)/images $(CONTENT_DIR)/*/images $(OUTPUT_DIR)

clean:
    rm -rf output

upload:
    aws s3 sync $(OUTPUT_DIR)/$(CONTENT_DIR) s3://$(CONTENT_DIR) --delete

Feel free to use it yourself, the source is available here.

To discuss this with the author, tweet @stephenbalaban.

Or go back to the home page.