Adding a Wiki to the Site

Some things on the blog are supposed to have a longer shelf-life. But the nature of a blog is to present things in a timeline. I employ cross-links from older posts to newer posts to encourage exploration with the introduction of the “linked posts” part at the bottom of each post. And I have a structured overview to help with discovery. Even then I branched out into other topical pages, like the TextKit overview, or the even larger FastSpring/Distribute outside the MAS page. To make sense of the timeline, I introduce what’s basically a ‘garden’ to my ‘stream’. It’s not a new idea, but I find not having these overview pages to hamper my writing. Some things need systematic overviews, and I enjoy making these, but there’s no good place for them.

Continue reading …

How to Add Backlinks in Nanoc Static Site Generator

Since I’ve added backlinks to the bottom of posts today, I figured I might as well share the code. I’m using static site generator nanoc. It has a preprocessing section in the compilation step where you can add new items and modify items that are read from disk further. I got the basis for this code from Denis Defreyne, creator of nanoc. (Check out his code.)

Continue reading …

Nanoc3 Boilerplate

I put my personal nanoc boilerplate setup on GitHub. Maybe you find the deployment process useful.

Deployment Process

I assume you’re public html folder is called htdocs/ and you can create new folders below your domains folder but outside htdocs/.

I also assume you use my Rakefile: upon rake build it will checkout the branch ‘deploy’ and put all files from output/ in there. Uploading from ‘deploy’ to the production server will only copy the HTML output, not the nanoc setup.

  1. Initialize bare production git repository on the server:

    git init --bare ~/doms/example.com/git
    
  2. You’ll want automatic updates when you push to the server. Use git’s own
    post-receive hook:

    # add to ~/doms/example.com/git/hooks/post-receive
    echo "Updating website ..."
    cd /the/full/path/to/doms/example.com/htdocs || exit
    unset GIT_DIR
    git pull origin 
    echo "Update complete."
    

    Make it executable:

    chmod +x post-receive
    
  3. Initialize git repository in htdocs/. This will point to the bare
    repository on the server and check out the current version:

    # given you're in ~/doms/example.com/htdocs
    git init
    git remote add origin ../git
        
    # setup branch to pull from:
    git config branch.master.remote origin
    git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/deploy
    
  4. Setup production server locally:

    git remote add production ssh://user@example.com/~/doms/example.com/git/
    git remote show production
    
  5. Commit changes locally and put them on the server:

    git commit
    rake build
    git push production deploy
    

    You can push all branches via git push production to backup your code.
    Only the branch ‘deploy’ will be visible to the public.

Sources

I once combed this together from various sources: