v0.6.0

This release includes the ability to use an external theme, and updates the included templates to make that support easier to deal with. This was reported in #26, and implemented in #27.

Migration Overview

If you've previously edited the in-built templates, which would get overwritten upon upgrade, you can now avoid that problem:

• Install this new release.
• Export the in-built templates to a local directory.
• Edit them as you prefer, to change the text, CSS, and layout.
• Specify the local path to your theme in the ephemeris.json file, so that these themes will be used when you rebuild your blog.

Template Changes

The templates have been edited slightly in this release, as part of the migration. There are two changes:

• .Prefix and Prefix variables have changed.
  • These contain the URL-prefix to use when generating the blog.
  • The new setting {{PREFIX}} should be used to retrieve this value.
• Previously the templates included the data/ prefix to all include-files.
  • This has now gone away, and is unnecessary.

Migration Example

My own blog is stored within a git-repository and looked like this:

blog.steve.fi/
├── comments/
├── data/
└── ephemeris.json

I export the in-built templates to a local theme directory:

$ ephemeris -export-theme=theme/
Creating directory theme
..
Copying data/tag_page.tmpl to theme/tag_page.tmpl
Copying data/tags.tmpl to theme/tags.tmpl

This results in a directory tree looking like so:

blog.steve.fi/
├── comments/
├── data/
├── theme/
└── ephemeris.json

Now I update my configuration file to add a configuration-key ThemePath:

$ cat ephemeris.json 
{
    "PostsPath"   : "data/",
    "CommentAPI"  : "https://api.steve.fi/Blog/",
    "CommentsPath": "comments/",
    "OutputPath"  : "output/",
    "Prefix"      : "https://blog.steve.fi/",
    "ThemePath"   : "theme/"
}

Now this is done I can edit the contents of theme/* as I see fit, and remain confident that future upgrades will not overwrite my changes.

v0.5.0

This release contains fixes an issue with sorting upon the front-page, and sidebar, for blogs that have fewer than ten entries, as noted in #22, and resolved in #23.

Once the sorting issue was fixed some minor changes were made to the implementation to remove some repetition in our code, and improve testing (reported in #24, and fixed in #25).

v0.4.0

This release updates our code to require the use of go v1.16, or higher, to build. Using the most recent golang compiler means we can take advantage of the new "go embed" support, and remove the need to use an external tool to embed our theme/templates files within our binary.

There were some minor linting updates required, and we've resynced our dependencies to be the most recently available, but nothing changed in this release which should be externally visible.

v0.3.1

This release contains zero changes compared to the previous v0.3.0, it is solely being made to automate the building of the project via the Github Actions / CI process.

v0.3.0

This release contains a small number of minor updates:

• We now correctly pluralize the number of comments on an entry.
  • Reported in #12, resolved in #13.
• We now generate a GUID field in our generated RSS file.
  • Reported in #14, resolved in #15
• Minor changes were made to our entries to try to make them more "responsive", and attractive when viewed upon a mobile-device.
  • This was a quick change, rather than a complete overhaul. There is certainly room for further improvements in this area.

v0.2.0

This release has been made to bundle up the changes since the last one.

On the whole there hasn't been too many changes:

• Generate various output paths in different goroutines for speedup
  • i.e. "/archive", "/tags", etc.
• Cut down on pointless sorts, also as an optimisation.
• Allow the configuration path to be configured via a command-line argument.
• Process blog input files recursively.
  • In the past we just loaded "input/*.txt".
• Improved comment-output:
  • We now only render the user-supplied link if it was actually present.
• Finally we've documented comment-setup, and made the URL of the handler a configurable value.

v0.1.0

This is the first stable release, although I've been using this tool to generate my blog for approximately the past week.

The project consists of a simple page ephemeris which contains code for:

• Loading blog-posts.
• Loading blog-comments.

To make those classes useful there is cmd/ephemeris which actually loads the posts/comments and generates the blog. This command is the basically hardwired to behave well for me, containing embedded text/template templates which are used to generate the output.

Although I don't expect this will ever become a general-purpose blogging utility the option is there, I could move links/references from the templates to the configuration file (JSON). We'll see if there is any interest.