🌍️🦀️ World Crab

The world is changing. A mouse got lose and fell off the discworld. Consequently the elephants got scared and hopped off Great A'Tuin's back. As luck would have it a gigantic crab with four gophers on its back took its place.

What's this project about?

A static meta blog generator aka a planet.

Imagine you have a bunch of static blogs made with Hugo and you're looking for a way to aggregate those blogs easily without worrying too much about the details and without duplicating metadata. If this sounds too good to be true, the world crab is for you!

🔧️ How do I use this?

Setup a static website

The world crab's task is to populate the disc (or planet). Which means you initially need to generate the actual page with a static generator. This can be done with Hugo, Jekyll or Sculpin. An example with Hugo could be setup like so:

hugo new site -f yaml disc
git submodule add https://github.com/halogenica/beautifulhugo.git disc/themes/beautifulhugo
sed -i s@.Permalink@.Params.original_link@ disc/themes/beautifulhugo/layouts/partials/*.html
hugo -s disc -t beautifulhugo

This creates a new, empty site using the BeautifulHugo theme. The sed command here is crucial because it turns a regular blog into an aggregator where all posts link back to the original blog!

Generate aggregated posts

Be sure to create a file disc.yaml containing the repos you want to include:

blogs:
- https://gitlab.com/kalikiana/kalikiana.gitlab.io.git
- https://openqa-bites.github.io/index.xml
- http://dominique.leuenberger.net/blog/feed/

Installation

This project is built using cargo, which means you can install it directly from git:

cargo install --git https://github.com/kalikiana/worldcrab
worldcrab disc

or build it from a local clone, which also allows you to work on it and contribute patches:

git clone https://github.com/kalikiana/worldcrab
cargo run disc

The world crab will expect to find a file disc.yaml at the root of the folder containing your static site and the first argument is simply your root folder.

Note: You will need libopenssl-devel on openSUSE, libssl-dev on Ubuntu or openssl-devel on Fedora respectively.

Render modes

By default the world crab produces markdown with front matter written in YAML, which can be processed with Hugo or another static site generator. The html renderer can also produce a static website from that:

worldcrab --html disc

👷️ Contributing

How do you validate your code?

Rather than relying on manual testing or waiting for CI you can locally check that your code is sound and also formatted properly:

cargo fmt
cargo clippy
cargo test