Matthew Consterdine

Moving this Blog to GitLab Feb. 11, 2020 in Text

This blog has now been moved to GitLab, allowing me to experiment with their CI / CD setup.

Fractal Pen Plotters Feb. 3, 2020 in Fractals, Photos

If you want to try it, I have updated my Fractal Explorer to export fractals using PenPlot coloring. Then use potrace to convert the image to a SVG. If you want to print this specific fractal, why not download either the PNG or the SVG.

BathTub Orchestra at Roots Jan. 19, 2020 in Flute, Music, Orchestra, Videos

BathTub Orchestra at Roots

Today the BathTub Orchestra’s is playing at Bradford-upon-Avon’s annual Roots Music Festival, at the Wiltshire Music Centre. I had a fantastic time playing the flute. Here is a playlist from the night.

We Made the Paper Jan. 14, 2020 in Flute, Music, Photos

That was Over Quickly Jan. 9, 2020 in Photos

BathTub Orchestra's Christmas Celebration Dec. 4, 2019 in Flute, Music, Orchestra, Snow, Videos

BathTub Orchestra's Christmas Celebration

Today I performed in BathTub Orchestra’s Christmas Celebration. I had a great time playing the flute. Here is a playlist from the night.

Hack Automata Oct. 17, 2019 in Csharp, Games, Unity

Hello Lisbon Sep. 2, 2019 in Photos, Portugual

Jekyll Category and Year Pages Without Plugins Mar. 20, 2019 in Jekyll, Text, Tutorial

Jekyll is fantastic, easy to use, and extensible. However, some Jekyll hosts such as GitHub Pages do not allow people to use custom plugins - and I want category and year pages. But rightly so. Allowing custom plugins would require hosts to allow users to run arbitrary Ruby code on their build servers and possibly create a mess. This problem is solvable, but it’s ultimately simpler to just ban them entirely.

This constrained environment forces you to get creative. On this blog I use the fantastic jekyll-compress-html template which minifies the very post you are reading. I have written by own template to automatically replace standard markdown or HTML images with lazily loaded ones. And finally, I have written a small (it’s only a hundred or so lines ;) ) Makefile to automatically, among other-things, generate year and category pages:

# Find categories and years
CATTARGETS  = $(shell grep -h '^categories:' -r _posts/ | awk -F ':' \
              '{print $$2}' | tr ' ' '\n' | sed '/^$$/d' | sort | uniq | \
              awk '{print "categories/"$$1".html"}')
YEARTARGETS = $(shell find _posts/ -regextype egrep -regex '.*/[0-9]{4}.[^/]*' \
              -printf '%P\n' | cut -c-4 | sort | uniq | \
              awk '{print "years/"$$1".html"}')

# Generate category pages
cat: cat-clean $(CATTARGETS)
categories/%.html: _templates/category.html
	cp $< $@
	sed -i 's/#####CATEGORY#####/$*/' $@

# Generate year pages
year: year-clean $(YEARTARGETS)
years/%.html: _templates/year.html
	cp $< $@
	sed -i 's/#####YEAR#####/$*/' $@

To use, simply create _templates/category.html and a _templates/year.html templates and run make cat year. The code assumes your posts start with the date and they are stored in the default _posts/. When run #####CATEGORY##### and #####YEAR##### will be replaced with the templated value.