Switch to Cryogen

My blog was previously served by Jekyll, with a theme adapted from So Simple. This suited me very well. Elegant layout, satisfactory responsive design, fast processing of pages.

But then, every time I wanted to write a quick post, at the time of starting Jenkins to heat up the receptacle of my prose, bing! a mismatch is detected between coffeescript / the Jekyll engine / its plugins / gem / bundle or whatever...

And here I am compelled to spend 20 minutes trying to update all of these elements instead of improving my English writing – and my grammar deserves a good upgrade...

For a while I used a Docker container wrapping Jekyll and its plugins. It's an interesting experience, which has the advantage to freeze versions of tools required for the blog, while letting those of workstation freely evolve.

And then I have wondered: this is a blog about Clojure, why not use a blog engine that is made of it, and enables hosting on Github? And I quickly came across Cryogen, a very good static website generator.

Everything is fine, however, I made two small changes to the core project.

For this I use intern function, which allows to change the root binding of a var in another namespace. This is a handy feature when you want to change a single function without cloning the entire project.

1. The first in the compiler namespace, on the add-prev-next function, where I reversed the order of the previous and next pages because I find it more logical to have the historical on the left.

   (intern 'cryogen-core.compiler
           (with-meta #_1 'add-prev-next
                      {:doc (str "Adds a :prev and :next key to the page/post"
                                 " data containing the title and uri of the "
                                 "prev/next post/page if it exists")})
           (fn
             [pages]
             (map (fn [[next target prev]] ; before: [prev target next]
                    (assoc target
                      :prev (if prev (select-keys prev [:title :uri]) nil)
                      :next (if next (select-keys next [:title :uri]) nil)))
   

① with-meta keeps the original docstring and attach it to the function, because it is not possible to do this in the fn block [].

2.The second in the markup namespace, on the rewrite-hrefs function, where I open a new tab when target is specified at the end of the link. A little regex makes the substitution.

Finally, the day you use intern to define a macro, please remember:

• to add the meta :macro true in the name of var
• to add two arguments to your function, &form and env (which are not required with defmacro) otherwise you might look for a moment why the substitutions do not behave as expected...

(intern 'monger.query (with-meta 'with-collection {:macro true})
        (fn [&form &env ^DB db ^String coll & body]
          `(let [coll# ~coll
                 db# ~db
                 db-coll# (if (string? coll#)
                            (.getCollection ^DB db# ^String coll#)
                            coll#)
                 query# (-> (empty-query db-coll#) ~@body)]
             (exec query#))))