Ask HN: Canonical form for blog content?

[projectramo]

Suppose you want one canonical form for all your blog content. I assume it would be a variant of markdown.

However, you want to preserve tags, table of contents etc.

And you want to be able to submit this content to a static site engine (Jekyll etc), or the major private platforms (say, Wordpress, Medium, Ghost) and also the closed garden blogs (Linkedin).

What would be the best form and structure to store them in? One folder with all the posts? How would the meta-data be stored?

If that is not possible, is it possible to have one target (say Wordpress) which makes it easy to export to others?

[kirubakaran]

Have you looked into org-mode? Your content stays plain text and you can use Pandoc or other such tools to generate various types of documents.

That is how I have my website https://kirubakaran.com/ set up and I love it. I write in org-mode, with meta-data in "front-matter", and I publish with Hugo https://gohugo.io/

[projectramo → kirubakaran]

I am mediocre with emacs (thought I never understood vim at all), but maybe I’ll give it a try.

Never heard of pandocs but it looks like a useful tool for this. Thanks.

[kirubakaran → projectramo]

I don't think you need to know a lot of Emacs first to be productive in org-mode. All the best!

[moviuro]

Even though I don't publish my posts everywhere, I use the pandoc markdown, which you can extend to some degree with YAML definitions; see e.g. one of my blog posts [0]. Probably not a silver bullet, but it should be able to hold the info you want to store.

[0] https://gitlab.com/moviuro/try.popho.be/blob/master/wg.md

[projectramo → moviuro]

Thanks for the (second) Pandoc recommendation. This is a sign.