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One thing I've been wanting to do for a while now is move my site off WordPress and get back to a simple static site. I started on that journey tonight. I exported all posts from WordPress into one massive xml file, and I then wrote two Java apps (1/4)
The first app converts the WordPress export into my new static site format (one directory per post, each containing an index.xml file containing all data about the blog post) (2/4)
The second app is a simple template engine that handles variable replacement, includes directives, etc, so that I can easily break my pages up into smaller chunks of reusable content. This operates over all posts, and also supports pages to create the other 'static' pages (3/4)
I know template engines exist and I've used many in the past, but I'm enjoying working on small projects every now and then, to challenge myself to tackle new kinds of problems. Last months exploration was building a small and fast http server, for example (4/4)
Still having a blast working on this when time permits, although my attention has turned to my wordpress importer to clean up the incoming data. I've also split the templating framework out and created a separate project for my website, so now others can use it too! :-)
One challenge I'm yet to get to is introducing boolean logic into my templating framework to allow for conditional inclusion of things, such as imports or styles / classes. Other than that, it is just cleaning up a bunch of the old site html and ensuring all links work.
I wanted to test relative URLs and realised I needed to spin up a server to test properly. However, as I mentioned in an earlier message in this thread, I just so happened to write a basic HTTP server last month. Changed the wwwroot config and it worked beautifully :-)
