Wright Access.

Generating this website part 8

Crossposting

Occasionally (very occasionally in fact – this has only happened once!) I write something which is intended to be cross-posted to another site as well as being hosted on my own. I did this with my post on proxies and pipes, which was also pretty much the first bit of Haskell code I put out, and is probably hopelessly outdated by this point, but there it is.

The idea here is that I want to be able to write a post on my site as usual, but also have it uploaded to the site that I’m contributing to. I have another script which deals with uploading the post to WordPress, so all this part of the generator has to do is add a header to the top of the post linking to the other version of the site.

Let’s begin with the standard fluff…

> {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

> {-# LANGUAGE UnicodeSyntax #-}

> module Crossposting where

> import Prelude.Unicode

> import Control.Monad.Unicode

> import Hakyll

All this module really does is expose a function, crosspostField, which returns the content of the header we want to insert at the top of the page if it’s a crosspost. This is fed into the template for posts.

> crosspostField :: String → Context a

> crosspostField key = field key $ getCrosspostHeader key ∘ itemIdentifier

The idea behind this is to extract the field identified by key from the metadata at the top of the post file, and pass it off to getCrosspostHeader to turn into a header body. The job of this function, then, is to look in the templates/xp/ folder for a template file whose name matches the value of the field, render that template if found, and return it – otherwise we return an empty string. This is given below.

> getCrosspostHeader :: String → Identifier → Compiler String

> getCrosspostHeader key n = getMetadata n ≫= toHeader ∘ lookupString key

>   where loadHeader        

= fmap itemBody ∘ header

>         toHeader          

= maybe (return "") loadHeader

>         header name       

= makeItem ""

>                           

≫= loadAndApplyTemplate (templatePath name) xpContext

>         templatePath name 

= fromFilePath $ "templates/xp/" ++ name ++ ".html"

>         xpContext         

= defaultContext

Note that the header itself is a template, rendered using the defaultContext context. This means it has access to other fields in the post’s metadata – useful if you want to link to the other version of the site, as you can put its URL or ID into the metadata.