Introduction

I have been writing Raku Advent posts annually since 2016 and it's always been a struggle for me to get a reliable transformation of my source file into the Raku Advent Wordpress (WP) website without something getting changed by WP. Then, the menus are terrible and editing can be troublesome. In this article I hope to show how the situation can be improved.

Background

The great name change to Raku this year unfortunately happened late in the year and there was not a lot of time to get a new Raku Advent website ready. Consequently, theme selection and tweaking, confusion over the actual Raku Advent website link, and unfortunate article cancellations were wrinkles in the normally smoother process. However, we plan to improve the website before the 2020 Advent season, and also get commitments earlier with concrete drafts available sooner. In the meantime, in this hastily prepared stand-in article, I will go into a bit of detail on some help we hope to offer.

Article creation

In past years I've created the articles in Gihub-flavored markdown, manually (with the assistance of my Emacs editor) converted each paragraph to single, long lines, and then posted it in a Github gist After that, I used the tool, developed by Zoffix and modified by ??, to extract the html from Github's representation of the markdown which results in a nice highlighting of code blocks. Finally, that html is copied and pasted into WP and a publishing schedule set up. That process is outlined here:

  1. Write the post in Github-favored Markdown text
  2. Collapse each paragraph to one long line
  3. Paste the source into a Github gist
  4. Use the existing Advent tool to extract the resulting html representation to one's local computer
  5. Copy the html and paste it into the blank, html view of the selected WP editor
  6. View the finished product and check for errors

If errors are found:

  1. Correct the errors in the WP editor

OR

  1. correct the errors in the source
  2. repeat steps 2 through 6 again

That process is not so bad the first time though it, but when, inevitably, errors are found, one has the choice of manually editing it on WP or modifying the source and going through the entire process again! Neither choice is very good. So I created a Raku tool to eliminate some of the problems. My new steps as of this year:

  1. write the post in raw html
  2. run my Advent tool (make-wp-advent) to format the source into WP-acceptable html
  3. copy the html and paste it into the blank, html view of the selected WP editor
  4. view the finished product and check for errors

If errors are found:

  1. correct the errors in the WP editor

OR

  1. correct the errors in the source
  2. repeat steps 2 through 4 again

So, in my new process, I've eliminated a couple of steps, but I still have to copy/paste my clean WP source into the WordPress editor. I addition, I have not taken advantage of the various APIs to do the heavy lifting.

Summary

This year has seen a lot of changes in the Raku community, especially with the name change, and not all are done yet. One area that still needs work is improving the new Raku Advent website. We also hope to make it easier to create and post Raku Advent articles as well as get more participation. Note the 2020 schedule is open now, so you can get your slot early and avoid last minute shopping, er, Raku Adventing!

I ❤️ ❤️ Raku! 😊

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

APPENDIX

Notes

References