Show HN: Simple-blogger – blog generated from GitHub project READMEs

Simple Blogger

This is a simple blog generator which creates a blog based on a user's github projects. It creates a post for each github project and uses the content of project README as post content.

How to create your own blog?

• Clone this repo
• Change githubUserName, linkedinUserName, twitterUserName in index.js to yours
• Modify excluded_repos array in index.js based on your use case
• Create a github repo: <<your-username>>.github.io
• Commit changes and push to <<your-username>>.github.io
• Your blog is live at <<your-username>>.github.io
• You can also set up custom domain. See github-guide.

Motivation

I trired various blog generators such as Jekyll, Hugo, Ghost, but they seemed to require some maintenance overhead. Plus, for my use case, most of my post would be related to a coding project, so I didn't want to write a project README AND a corresponding "blog" post leading to duplication of work.

I also felt like the blog generators had too many nuts and bolts for my taste. I have tried to keep this project as vanilla as possible using plain javascript, css and html. The only dependencies are - showdownjs, highlight.js and mathjax -> used to render markdown (with code blocks and latex) as html.

Design choices

• On demand rendering - every page load fetches info from github using their api
• When a post is clicked, the README content is fetched as markdown text and rendered into HTML
• Because of on-demand fetching, there is noticeable lag on page load, which is fine for my use case.
• Uses showdownjs to convert markdown to HTML
• Uses highlight.js and mathjax to format the code blocks and latex blocks once the markdown is converted to html
• Excludes forked projects by default
• Use whitey.css for theme. I took whitey.css from Typora editor
• Can skip repos if you don't want to create a post for certain projects (eg: unfinished/not-started projects)

To-do

• Look into latex rendering support Issue #1
• Add support for non-project posts (don't wanna have to create a repo everytime you have to write a post). I am thinking of adding a special repo- "blog-posts" and fetch all files from that repo as posts. Issue #2
• [Maybe] Add recent github commits/updates to the project page

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