A bit about this blog

Zoe Picone

04-10-2022

I’m bogged down with work at the moment and can’t dedicate the time to writing anything of note, so I’ll just talk a bit about how I made this blog.

I wrote a script to generate the pages and table of contents, which you can see here. The pages are generated using Pandoc Markdown, which is one of the reasons I decided to roll my own script - the tables especially are nicer to use than any other Markdown dialect I’ve seen.

Other than pandoc-ruby, which provides pandoc bindings, the only other library used was date from the Ruby standard library. A large portion of the time spent working on this script was figuring out how to sort by date for the table of contents - currently I parse the exact line of the file that contains a date value and use this to sort an array of files. The script is rather inefficient though, due to my use of IO.readline() which was the most readable option but also reads the entire file when I only need two lines from it.

In conclusion, this was a fun experiment and hopefully will be a good addition to my website.

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