Shite: rc/ndb based gemini/html blog script

[edit 2024-09-02] Since the writing of this post i have migrated the blog to hugo, since i wanted to minimize the traction of creating new posts. shite was a fun hack, but going from gemtext to html was not very enjoyable.

I have always wanted a simple way to (b)log entries and publish them. With the arrival of the gemini protocol, i thought it would be cool to make an simple set of scripts to achieve that. This post discusses parts of the static blog generator called shite.

Shite is written in rc. It expects you to provide a ndb(6) styled file with entries like

type=post
	id=1
	title="sometitle"
	date=2021-04-15
	tag=tag1 tag=tag2
	content="content/post1"

It then creates associations of tags, titles, content files and ids and generates very basic HTML to render a top site navigation bar. For now these “index” files are just one association per line separated by whitespace, but it might be interesting to actually create another ndb(6) styled file with the other association. First of all ndb/query is an amazing general purpose tool. In the above example

ndb/query -a -f postdb type post title

would return all the titles, one result per title. Evidently the program needs to sometimes break results by newlines or others by spaces. For that i discovered a very (unintuitive in the beginning, coming from a UNIX world) interesting fact of the IFS characters in Plan9. The man page says that we generally split the output of a command by issuing

`{command}

That would return all the splits by the default ifs separators which as the man page says it is ’ \t\n’ so. As it also says you can respecify these by a form like

`split {command}

sometimes i wanted to just split by newline so naturally i was trying to write

`'\n' {command}

After some confusion, i realized what the manual page said. It should be

`'
' {command}

Having there literally the newline character. Things like that and generally the thought that the interfaces have in the Plan9 side of computing, end up making way more sense. Learning the rc syntax to do things is way simpler than any other shell i have attempted to learn and it’s a pity that its approach to escape the quotation hell that you end up in other shells hasn’t been picked up by other shells.

The code for shite can be found at our git