Adding a markup language

The previous post introduces a small language to define post files and in this project you can find some java classes to transform them into a small blog, based on bootstrap. The first improvement I see that was missing it's a markup language to speed up writing of posts. I decide to investigate a bit on static site generators like for example Jekyll, actually the one used by github.

I started searching for static site generator or static web framework and I found among others: Jekyll, Pelican, Octopress, Assemble, Nanos, Wintersmith, Phrozn, Cactus, Hexo, Genit.
One based on java is JBake.
There is a comprehensive list here.

At this point I asked to myself what I would like to do in the future: use a fully featured static site generator or continue to use my code. I decided for the ladder because the blog itself is not my first goal, instead I would also to experiment with grammars and code generation. So I looked at the above projects more as examples of files organization than projects to use in practice. I will add feature one by one as soon as I will need something not yet implemented.

Write directly in HTML is time consuming, so the first thing to implement is the possibility to use Markdown instead of plain HTML, a list of implementations is maintained here.

Between others MarkdownPapers use JavaCC, and PegDown is derived from a PEG grammar. I chose the ladder because of better documentation.

After adding some jars I was able to write my posts using markdown. Now post files with extension .md are parsed as post but abstract and content are transformed with PegDown.
This post is the first of this kind, check out adding-markup-language.md .
This extension has also the side effect that posts written in markdown can be edited with syntax highlight if opened with a specialized editor.

The java part had very few modifications, for example to process the content I just needed, see the Blog class:

if (post.getName().endsWith(MARKDOWN)) {
    content = new PegDownProcessor().markdownToHtml(content);
}