Late last year, I decided to refresh my blog with a more responsive design. In doing so, I looked for ways to simplify my blogofile setup. I looked at Wintersmith, Pelican, and PyGreen but in the end decided to roll my own: five Mako templates, 170 lines of Python, and my posts in Markdown. I was pleased. Mostly. Two aspects of my generator nagged me, both of which I corrected this past weekend.

Dockerize It¶

First, my simple script had not-so-simple dependencies: the Mako, Markdown, and Pygments Python packages; a local webserver to preview the rendered site; and rsync to upload the generated site to my webhost. Originally, I setup my local box with all of these, choosing to "pay-later" should I get a new computer, have to restore my box, want to post from another machine, etc. Now eight months on, I decided to pay-down this technical debt by creating a Docker image that packages everything together using a simple Dockerfile:

FROM ubuntu:14.04

MAINTAINER Peter Parente <parente@cs.unc.edu>

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get -yq install python-pip openssh-client rsync
RUN pip install Mako==0.9.1 Markdown==2.4 Pygments==1.6

ADD . /srv/blog
WORKDIR /srv/blog

I drive the build and use of the image from a convenient Makefile in my blog git repo.

# build the docker image once
make build

# render my blog posts acessbile via a contiainer-host mount
# then run a Python SimpleHTTPServer to view the results locally
make render

# render and rsync the content to my webhost
make publish

Now rendering, previewing, and uploading my blog requires Docker and, optionally, make. That's it.

IPythonize It¶

Second, I felt both liberated and limited by Markdown-only postings. I say liberated because writing in Markdown beat the heck out of writing pure HTML or using some WYSIWYG editor, especially for postings laden with code. I say limited because I missed the richness of explanation available in another tool I'd been using daily for over a year now, IPython Notebook. To quiesce the latter feeling, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and support both pure Markdown files and IPython Notebooks as blog posts.

The addition of a couple dependencies in my Dockerfile, the ballooning of my generator code to a massive 250 lines of Python, and the creation of a new template and stylesheet enabled the blog post you see before you.

And now, an amazing demonstration of IPython-powered posts ...

HOWTO: xkcd matplotlib plots¶

First, install the Humor Sans font.

Next, flush the matplotlib font cache.

Then, enable inline plots in the style of xkcd.

Finally, humbly copy and tweak an existing matplotlib example.

And voilá!

The future is bright, I tell you.

Genericize It¶

So I've scratched my two blog itches, and, as expected from itching, have created more. The fact that my blog generator is now in a portable, reusable container yet still somewhat hardcoded to this site bugs me. With a bit more elbow grease, I believe I can make a Docker image that can seed a blog like mine for any purpose simply by setting a few environment variables.

When or whether I get around to scratching this itch is an open question. Meanwhile, I solemnly promise never to write another veribified heading on this blog (but I refuse to make a similar promise for xkcd-style plots).