Modify Markdown files

3 related links

• Convert Wordpress into Memex
• Export Wordpress to Markdown
• A new day

The second last step of the process to convert my Wordpress blog into mkdocs generated site. This step modifies the markdown files produced in the export-wordpress-to-markdown process and generates new content for the purposes of:

• Modify markdown sourced from Wordpress to tidy up any outdated content/links to make it fit within mkdocs requirements.
• Modify the structure of the exported data to re-create the blog structure.
• Generate new content to re-create additional blog content (e.g. category pages, tag pages, archives, RSS feeds, adding comments/pingbacks)

Done in two main Python scripts

1. blogTidyUp.py - Run from the Memex repo to modify the markdown files from the previous step and relocate them into the blog repo. Run once to generate/rewrite the blog structure.
2. Use computational-components (e.g. blog.py) running from within mkdocs to generation additional markdown files during the site build process.

blogTidyUp.py

Three main steps

1. Parse the Wordpress XML file to extract additional data used in the following steps.
2. Read, modify, and move the markdown files for blog pages.
3. Read, modify, and move the markdown files for blog posts.

The distinction between pages and posts is made because:

• wpparse places pages and posts into separate folders; and,
• the mkdoc blog's intended folder structure for pages and posts differs.

However, the the same process is performed for both pages and posts:

1. Read the content of the markdown file produced by wpparse

2. Modify the content by

   • converting the publish date to a string

   • clean up the content of the file using data from the XML file

     Changes made includes:

     • replace davidtjones.wordpress.com links with djon.es links
     • convert djon.es full links to absolute links within mkdocs
     • remove any links internal to the blog post/page
     • change Comments author "admin" to "David Jones"
       • clean up the YAML front matter for the post/page
     • Move the file to the correct location by

   • creating and copying any images and other resource files to the correct location

   • writing an updated index file with the post/page content

Computational components

mkdocs-gen-file is a plugin for the mkdocs static site generator used to publish the new blog. mkdocs-gen-file enables the integration of local Pythons scripts into the mkdocs build process. A primary enabler of the computational-components approach used in this site.

For the blog, the primary computational components is blog.py, which performs the following tasks:

• Generate category pages.

  At the time of this work blog posts were allocated into 152 different categories. A category page lists an excerpt of all the posts belonging to the category. - Generate an RSS feed - using python-feedgen of the 20 most recent posts. - Generate the home page, which

  • adds excerpts of the 20 most recent posts to the home page

  • generate archive pages for all posts

    An archive page is a list of all posts for a month and year. - adds to the left-column of the home page a navigable list of archive pages.

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