blog-tools

name	blog-tools
description	A collection of helpers to build the blog.

Building the blog with automatic-restarts on changes

This app uses a combination of Gradle (to build the Ktor web archive), and a set of tools to build the actual static HTML for the blog posts.

Building static content

# One time
cd src/main/tools
fnm use

# If it's a one-off build
npm run-script build

# Automatically re-build content when things change.
# Look at the package.json for more tools
npm run-script watch

Running Ktor with automatic restart

Use 2 Terminal windows to do the following:

1. Run the server

./gradlew run

2. Automatically restart Ktor when content changes

./gradlew -t build

Stopping

# Kill the watch process if you used `npm run-script watch`.

./gradlew --stop

Adding a new blog entry

• In src/main/resources/blog/md add a new markdown file for the blog entry. The filename should be in the format title.md where title is _ separated and in lower case.
• Add an entry in the "posts" array in src/main/resources/blog/md/manifest.json to include the new file in the build process. The entry should have the format:

{
    "title": "Title of the blog entry",
    "path": "title.md"
}

• The content of the markdown file should include the current date, and day with the following format:

Month Date Day, Year

For example:

October 10 Thursday, 2026

• Add an entry for the blog in src/main/resources/blog/md/toc.md. The format should look like this:

* [Title of the blog entry](/blog/title_of_blog_entry.html)

Make sure to add this link under the right year (based on the current date).

Deploying to Google App Engine

Make sure you do the following:

# 1. Build the blog
cd src/main/tools && npm run-script build && cd -

# 2. Stage the application for appengine
./gradlew appengineStage

# 3. Deploy
cd build/staged-app && gcloud app deploy && cd -