# NAME App::Followme - Simple static web site maintenance # SYNOPSIS use App::Followme qw(followme); followme(); # DESCRIPTION Followme does three things. First, it updates the constant portions of each web page when it is changed on any page. Second, it converts text files into html using a template. Third, it creates indexes for files when they are placed in a special directory, the archive directory. This simplifies keeping a blog on a static site. Each of these three actions are explained in turn. Each html page has sections that are different from other pages and other sections that are the same. The sections that differ are enclosed in html comments that look like and indicate where the section begins and ends. When a page is changed, followme checks the text outside of these comments. If that text has changed. the other pages on the site are also changed to match the page that has changed. Each page updated by substituting all its named blocks into corresponding block in the changed page. The effect is that all the text outside the named blocks are updated to be the same across all the html pages. Block text will be synchronized over all files in the folder if the begin comment has "per folder" after the name. For example: Text in "per folder" blocks can be used for navigation or other sections of the page that are constant, but not constant across the entire site. If there are any text files in the directory, they are converted into html files by substituting the content into a template. After the conversion the original file is deleted. Along with the content, other variables are calculated from the file name and modification date. Variables in the template are surrounded by double braces, so that a link would look like:
  • {{title}}
  • The string which indicates a variable is configurable. The variables that are calculated for a text file are: - body All the content of the text file. The content is passed through a subroutine before being stored in this variable. The subroutine takes one input, the content stored as a string, and returns it as a string containing html. The default subroutine, add\_tags in this module, only surrounds paragraphs with p tags, where paragraphs are separated by a blank line. You can supply a different subroutine by changing the value of the configuration variable page\_converter. - title The title of the page is derived from the file name by removing the filename extension, removing any leading digits,replacing dashes with spaces, and capitalizing the first character of each word. - url The relative url of the resulting html page. - time fields The variables calculated from the modification time are: `weekday, month,` `monthnum, day, year, hour24, hour, ampm, minute,` and `second.` The template for the text file is selected by first looking for a file in the same directory starting with the same name as the file, e.g., index\_template.html for index.html. If not found, then a file named template.html in the same directory is used. If neither is found, the same search is done in the directory above the file, up to the top directory of the site. As a final step, followme builds indexes for each directory in the archive directory. Each directory gets an index containing links to all the files and directories contained in it. And one index is created from all the most recently changed files in the archive directory. This index thus serves as a weblog. Both kinds of index are built using a template. The variables are the same as mentioned above, except that the body variable is set to the block inside the content comment. Loop comments that look like indicate the section of the template that is repeated for each file contained in the index. # CONFIGURATION Followme is called with the function followme, which takes one or no argument. followme($directory); The argument is the name of the top directory of the site. If no argument is passed, the current directory is taken as the top directory. Before calling this function, it can be configured by calling the function configure\_followme. configure_followme($name, $value); The first argument is the name and the second the value of the configuration parameter. All parameters have scalar values except for page-converter and variable\_setter, whose values are references to a function. The configuration parameters all have default values, which are listed below with each parameter. - absolute\_url (`0`) If Perl-true, urls on generated index pages are absolute (start with a slash.) If not, they are relative to the index page. Typically, you want absolute urls if you have a base tag in your template and relative otherwise. - text\_extension (`txt`) The extension of files that are converted to html. - archive\_index\_length (`5`) The number of recent files to include in the weblog index. - archive\_index (`blog.html`) The filename of the weblog index. - archive\_directory (`archive`) The name of the directory containing the weblog entries. - body\_tag (`content`) The comment name surrounding the weblog entry content. - variable (`{{*}}`) The string which indicates a variable in a template. The variable name replaces the star in the pattern. - page\_converter (`add_tags`) A reference to a function use to convert text to html. The function should take one argument, a string containing the text to be converted and return one value, the converted text. - variable\_setter (`set_variables`) A reference to a function that sets the variables that will be substituted into the templates, with the exception of body, which is set by page\_converter. The function takes one argument, the name of the file the variables are generated from, and returns a reference to a hash containing the variables and their values. # LICENSE Copyright (C) Bernie Simon. This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. # AUTHOR Bernie Simon