micron-blog

Pelican Plug-In and Theme for publishing a site in Micron markup format for Nomad Network Nodes

Example

The RandoNode pages at <ccfaae920f101f74afbae5ad779b0f4f> are generated using this Plug-In.

Installation

Install dependencies

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Create a Static Site from Scratch

Use the example folder as a starting point...

• Write your content in markdown formatted files and place them in the content folder
• Edit the micron formatted Jinja2 templates in theme/templates to your liking
• Generate the blog by running the following command in the example folder:

$ pelican content

Use alongside an existing Pelican installation

• Copy the theme and plugin to your Pelican site's folder
• Duplicate your pelicanconf.py file to something like micronconf.py
• Edit the new file and make sure Pelican can find the new folders by adding them to the PLUGIN_PATHS and editing the THEME and PLUGINS variables respectively
• If you want to place the micron .mu files in a different output folder than your generated HTML files, specify a path in a variable called MICRON_PATH
• Make sure RELATIVE_URLS is set to True
• Make sure all Links in your Markdown articles and pages are relative and local, since you will not be able to access http links inside Nomad Network

Example Settings, vary depending on your setup:

PLUGIN_PATHS = ["pelican-plugins"]
PLUGINS = ['micron']
THEME = 'micron-theme'
MICRON_PATH = 'micron_out'
RELATIVE_URLS = True

Generate the Micron pages by pointing Pelican to the Micron config file:

$ pelican content -s micronconf.py

Deployment

If you have not run Nomad Network yet, initialize the needed folder by running nomadnet once

$ nomadnet

Copy the generated .mu files from the output folder to the NN node's pages folder:

$ cp -R output/* ~/.nomadnetwork/storage/pages

Run your node and serve the pages....

Additional Formatting

Since micron templates do not support styling like CSS and Markdown is a strict content-only markup language all the color styling needs to be done using micron tags in the template files themselves.

Micron-blog offers a few Settings that allow to set enclosing tags for some of the inline and block elements that are rendered by Pelican:

MICRON_EMPHASIS_FORMAT = []
MICRON_STRONG_FORMAT = []
MICRON_LINK_FORMAT = []
MICRON_CODE_FORMAT = []
MICRON_HEADER_FORMAT = []
MICRON_QUOTE_FORMAT = []
MICRON_LIST_FORMAT = []

Each of them taks a list of exactly two tag definitions, one for the left and one for the right enclosing tag. For example, if you want to define all rendered links to be blue and underlined and all emphasized text to be yellow you could define the following settings in pelicanconfig.py:

MICRON_LINK_FORMAT = ['`F00f`_', '`_`f']
MICRON_EMPHASIS_FORMAT = ['`Fff0', '`f']

Now links created as:

[title](url)
*emphasized text*

will be rendered as:

`F00f`_`[title`url]`_`f
`Fff0`*emphasized text`*`f

If you want the same settings to be honoured by the templates, they need to be implemented respecively. The settings are accessible by the templates:

{{ MICRON_LINK_FORMAT[0] }}`[{{ p.title }}`:/page/{{ p.url }}]{{ MICRON_LINK_FORMAT[1] }}

Dynamic Content

If you want to place an executable script file in the output folder, use Pelican's STATIC_PATHS setting to mark it as a static file and the EXTRA_PATH_METADATA setting to copy it to the output folder.

STATIC_PATHS = ['../scripts/helloworld.mu']
EXTRA_PATH_METADATA = {'../scripts/helloworld.mu': {'path': 'micron/helloworld.mu'},}

A good way to link to such a dynamic content file is to add a dummy article or page with an empty save_as meta tag and a url tag pointing to the script's final location.

Title: Hello World
Date: 2023-05-22
save_as: 
url: helloworld.mu

(see the pelicanconf.py and script.md files in the examples folder.)