[2025-04-30]
I've been working on the site some more, and now I've created some automations to help make creating new posts easier!
It ended up being fairly painless, and I'm pleased that I was able to leverage my Python knowledge!
I got motivated to add RSS support after Alana Pearce, the main host my favorite podcast Play, Watch, Listen, said she fixed their Patreon's RSS feed, which made me think, people still use those? And like, they sound helpful! So I've added one. You can find it at feed.txt! (Neocities also has a guide on adding RSS to your site!) And in order make RSS, it helps to have the posts be generated instead of manually editing all the files 🙃.
I started off using Jinja2, then contemplated using a static site generator. Then I was like, "are there Python static site generators?" And there are! I found Pelican, and then realized, this basically does what I already was doing plus some markdown parsing. And then I thought, they're probably using someone else's library to parse the markdown. And sure enough, they are! So I grabbed the markdown library. Then I was like, how are they turning this text into nicely grouped items with metadata for RSS? So I read the docs and it turns out you can do this with the metadata extension to add some data at the beginning of each markdown file.
So I've turned all my old posts into markdown (there's only a few lol) and changed the pages that reference them to be Jinja templates! So that should all be live now. This also sets the groundwork for creating a template for the other pages! Up until now I've been editing them all by hand.
One roadblock I ran into was that I wanted to copy-paste the html into the new md files, but it was html escaping a lot
of it. I fixed it by adding |safe to my templates and surrounding the html with a <div>
after reading that by default it
ignored top-level html elements in the docs.
I also switched from using WebStorm to PyCharm for this project for the Jinja2 support 😋. But now unfortunately I need a better process for previewing my files, images are broken in the generated files. It's hard to get the tooling to work ðŸ˜.
Also note, we are now live on cindercube.net! ( previously, cindercube.neocities.org)
My best wishes to any who are reading!
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