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My place on the web

This is my personal website, oliverjam.es. It's where I experiment with some fun stuff and write blog posts. It is almost certainly over-engineered for the task of turning Markdown into HTML, since I wrote almost all the code from scratch. Currently (other than the Deno standard library) it has 3 external dependencies: marked, yaml and prismjs. I have no interest in writing a Markdown parser from scratch.

Docs

The below documentation is mostly so I don't forget how everything works.

Local development

  1. Make sure you have Git and Deno installed
  2. Clone this repo and cd into the directory
  3. Run deno task dev to generate the _site/ directory
  4. In another terminal tab run deno task serve to serve the site

Deploying

The deploy.sh script is a self-contained way to install Deno and build the site into _site/. This is currently run on Cloudflare Pages, but could easily be used on Netlify or in a GitHub Action or something. You just need to configure the platform to serve the _site/ directory after building.

Creating pages

Any .jsx file in the pages/ directory will be generated as an HTML page. The default export of the module should be a function that returns JSX. This JSX will be the content of the generated HTML file. The final HTML path matches the page file path. For example pages/index.jsx:

export default () => <h1>Home</h1>;

will generate _site/index.html:

<h1>Home</h1>

The page module can export a url variable to override the final path. For example pages/feed.jsx:

export let url = "feed.xml";
export default () => ...;

will generate _site/feed.xml.

Multiple pages from one template

A page module can generate many HTML pages by returning an array from its default export. Each array item should be an object with url and component properties. Each item will generate its own HTML page. For example:

export default () => {
  return [1, 2, 3].map((num) => ({
    url: num + ".html",
    component: <h1>{num}</h1>,
  }));
};

will generate _site/1.html containing <h1>1</h1>, _site/2.html containing <h1>2</h1>, and _site/3.html containing <h1>3</h1>.

To make this more obvious I have prefixed files that generate multiple pages with a $. E.g. pages/$article.jsx generates all the article pages.

Content

lib/data.js reads all the markdown files in content/ and parses the content to metadata + HTML. It also reads all CSS files in styles/ so pages can inline the correct styles. Pages can import these—module caching means it should only run once per build.

Markdown

All content/ files are rendered with the renderer in lib/markdown.js, which uses the marked parser. Headings have links and IDs added so they can be linked to, and code blocks are syntax highlighted using prismjs. Metadata is extracted from frontmatter and parsed using the yaml parser.

Assets

Each file in /assets is copied through to _site/assets with a hash of its contents added to its filename. E.g. assets/me.jpg -> _site/me.f5fd402f.jpg. This ensures the path will change if the file contents do, allowing us to cache these files forever in the browser.

Components can import a map of original file names to final hashed paths, since they otherwise cannot know the true path. For example:

import { ASSETS } from "../lib/assets.js"

function Avatar {
  return <img src={ASSETS.get("me.jpg")} alt="Me!" />
}

Dev server

There is a minimal streaming static file server in lib/serve.js for use in development. This expects to be passed a directory to serve and will attempt to resolve HTTP requests to files in that directory. If it encounters an error it will attempt to serve 404.html or 500.html files (for missing file or general errors respectively), to match how Cloudflare Pages handles errors in production.

JSX

There is a minimal JSX runtime in lib/jsx. Deno is configured to use this via the compilerOptions in deno.json and the import map in import-map.json. The renderer in lib/jsx/render.js attempts to recursively render JSX objects to HTML strings, with support for things like boolean attributes and void elements.