To Shave a Yak

2026-09-09 - hearthsinger

It is very likely because I've been poisoned by my job and just have some strange desire to automate everything I possibly can, but I think in the endless pursuit of making shortcuts and scripts to do busy work I may meet some of my desires for the longevity of this site.

My static site generator spindrift lacks many features, and I can't quite figure out whether my ethos there is that it simply shouldn't have those features, or whether I'm just being lazy and would rather write some bash than jump back into the Rust weeds. Today's missing feature is that there is no quick way to run a command and just be writing a post. Initially, the thought process was that writing yaml is quick and easy and surely nobody is going to get bored of having to remember what the post keys are and what values I used last time and what was that tag that I used on that one post.........

I took a little time today to solve the very first part of that as a one-off via a bash script in the blog repo, lol.

asteria@caprice:~/projects/blog/scripts|main⚡ ⇒  ./gen-post "Hi mom\!" -a "Your mom" -t one -t two
Generating new droplet from configuration:
    Title: Hi mom!
    Author: Your mom
    Date: 2026-09-08
    Tags: one two

    Filename: 2026-09-08-hi-mom.yaml

Wrote out 112 bytes:
    ---
    meta:
      author: Your mom
      date: 2026-09-08
      tags:
        - one
        - two
    title: Hi mom!
    content: lorem ipsum

Look at that! Nice little quick invocation to save like, 20-30 keystrokes. Cool!

I wanted to write this post to show off the script I had written to bootstrap the yaml of a post rather than make this a functionality or cli tool of spindrift, when I realized that I never got around to adding support of markdown-style codeblocks. Damn. You might notice that there is a codeblock in this post - did I manually edit it in, perhaps?

In fact, not at all. Spindrift now parses yaml for markdown more intelligently, first looking for what I have taken to calling "unsplittable vertical sections" (i.e. codeblocks), where newline whitespace needs to be preserved, then greedily parses the remaining content as blocks that can be disturbed along the vertical axis of the page to layout horizontally in their container as needed.

This does require, or encourage perhaps, that the content key of the post utilize yaml's "literal block scalar" (content: |\n) behavior for the post, rather than the "folding block scalar" (content: >\n) so that we don't accidentally lose important newline characters internal to a codeblock.

Once we've split our content string into the chunks we care about, removing the whitespace and newlines we don't care to keep outside of our unsplittable document chunks, we move on to html-escaping, and finally parsing markdown into html elements. This is all still done with some basic string operations and some painstakingly assembled regular expressions.

## et viola

we now have codeblocks!!

* These can be produced with the standard markdown:

```[optional language]
some content
(you can get codeblocks within codeblocks for examples like this
by escaping the first ` as \`)
```

* and produce the following html output:

<pre class="droplet-codeblock"><code>some content
(you can get codeblocks within codeblocks for examples like this
by escaping the first ` as \`)</code></pre>

!!!There is a catch!!!

Currently, the nice single-escaped backtick logic we can rely on
above clashes with other markdown formatting we might not want
in a code block. For example, there's no way to show you the
markdown syntax for **bolded text**, _sigh_.

I'll fix that later...

The next follow-up will be exposing the language tag provided to the codeblock as a data attribute on the <code> element so that you can configure syntax highlighters if you would so desire!

Errata: The codeblock above mentions that I can't show the bold/italic markdown syntax within the codeblock syntax. This was a visual gag because the text was simply styled that way. I retooled the parsing logic for content chunks to apply basic character escaping early to all blocks, keeping the behavior for \`, while applying text and link formatting only to non-codeblock chunks. Neat!

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