Go Beyond Static

2025-01-27

Go Beyond Static: Effortless Blog Automation

Recently, I found myself wondering why I don’t blog more often. With the obvious answer coming to me… ‘Well, I would if it weren’t such a pain to update the HTML files and my RSS feed.’ Well, that is what I like to tell myself anyway.

With that in mind, I took it upon myself to take out the friction of writing a new blog post. That is where I’ll start. By the end of this post I will cover all of the things I used to achieve this now seamless process.

The wicked HTML process

The issue when writing a blog post was that I would need to manually update the following files: blog.html, index.html, index.xml. Obviously on the face of it, it isn’t too much work to do. But it was just another step which had to be completed when creating new content. I’ll now walk you through the step by step process of what needed to happen when releasing a new post. Yeah this next part will probably bore you, apologies in advance.

To update the blog.html and index.html files, I needed to insert a block of HTML for each new post. Here’s an example of what that looked like:

<p>
  <li>
    <a href="blog/example.html">Example</a>
  </li>
  <span class="date">2025-01-27</span>
</p>

While ensuring that I had only the latest 3 posts on the index.html and in the right order, obviously I need to keep my home page up to date. The blog.html file contains all the posts I’ve created, as you could imagine, it could get very large. Who am I kidding I am currently averaging 2.5 posts a year… Anyway if someone else was writing the content this file could get very large and even more unpleasant to manage. This process was more or less the same for the RSS feed. The most annoying part? Always getting the date format correct. As you can probably tell I wasn’t the biggest fan of the process.

It’s going to get easier

This is where I decided to make the process better, I wanted it to be like how my blog posts are generated to HTML from markdown (If you are curious I use Pandoc to achieve this). I knew it would only take a few hours to implement this feature. But like all my other side projects, I put it to the back of my mind.

When it finally became time to start implementing the automation I knew I wanted to use Golang. As I quite like programming in the language and thought it would be a great choice for a CLI application.

With that plan in mind, I looked into how to create templates. Here are the two packages I decided to use: html/template, text/template. You might be thinking why are you using two different template packages, well one is for the RSS feed and the other is for my HTML files.

After I decided what I was going to use, it came time to actually start programming. There were 3 main components which I needed to address:

* Extracting the data from the markdown blog posts
* Updating the HTML and XML to support templates
* Writing the updated files in the static directory

The first part was quite straightforward; all I needed to do was extract the blog name and date from the markdown file. I created some structs to achieve the data structure, the hardest part of this section was making sure I was formatting the date correctly for the RSS feed, which in reality wasn’t anything too complicated.

The next task was to update the files to support the template packages I was using, I’m just going to cover the HTML files in this post. The following snippet loops through the posts and inserts their details into the HTML:

{{range .}}
<p>
    <li>
        <a href="{{.Link}}">{{.Title}}</a>
    </li>
    <span class="date">{{.Date}}</span>
</p>
{{end}}

Going through the above snippet: {{range .}} denotes the start of the loop for the template package, {{.Link}} {{.Title}} {{.Date}} all represent the data which is going to be inserted, and {{end}} denotes the end of the range loop.

From that I needed to make sure my data structure had a Link, Title, and Date field; plus it was an array of all my blog posts. Once I had all that working all I needed to do was run the execute function provided by the template package and I was golden!

The bliss of automation

After I completed the script all I needed to do was update my pipeline to ensure it compiled the HTML and RSS feed, which is pretty straightforward. Now I have a seamless process of writing my markdown posts and letting GitHub actions handle the rest. With GitHub Actions handling everything from compiling my website down to deploying it to AWS. I must admit while writing my first blog post after implementing the above it does feel like a much needed improvement. Hopefully this post has inspired some of you to streamline your own workflows too.

If anyone is actually interested in how this all works here is the repo which stores all this code: personal website. The files of interest would be the template directory and script/parseBlogFeed.go. Anyway, I hope you learned a thing or two, or found it interesting at the very least.

Thanks, Nathan.

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