Crafts Are Now Posts

I turned the craft section into a Craft category — then a tag years later. Drawing, Knitting, and Crochet became tags. The rest of this post is just notes about that.

Why?

I want to improve the organization of my site content.

I created the #craft pages in 2015 as a Jekyll collection. This kept them out of the site RSS feed, which made sense to me at the time. Craft pages were nothing like posts.

Switching to Hugo resulted in turning the Jekyll collection into its own section, with a layout that prominently featured an image of the finished project. I liked the layout so much that I incorporated it into posts. The only differences between craft and post content were their URLs and the folders I saved them in.

During my attempts to get Disqus working here, I changed the permalink configuration to something more blog-like — /:year/:month/:day/:title — scrubbing section out of the permalink as I slowly admitted to myself there was little to distinguish crafts and posts.

I complete the last step of this process today: transforming craft content into post content, and updating site configuration to handle this change.

How?

How much craft content will I need to migrate?

$ find content/craft/ -name '*.md' | wc -l
51

51 items is not bad, but it is more than I want to update manually. Time for a little code. Today I choose Ruby.

Transform front matter in Craft content

The plan is to transform craft content front matter for craft content, then manually move everything into content/post.

Here are the basic changes I need to make:

• For every markdown file in content/craft:
  • Category becomes “craft”
  • Former category (“knitting”, “drawing”, “crochet”) becomes first tag.
  • Oops I have some word case inconsistencies (“Knitting”, “knitting”). Fix those.
  • Rewrite the file with the new front matter.

I use YAML for front matter. Ruby includes a core library for handling YAML. Find.find helps me find the markdown content files. This means I do not need to install extra libraries!

migrate-craft.rb

require 'find'
require 'yaml'

CRAFT_DIR = 'content/craft'

Find.find(CRAFT_DIR) do |path|
  # Rule out everything but markdown files
  next unless FileTest.file? path

  next unless File.extname(path) == ".md"

  # Load front matter and content
  fence_count = 0
  front_matter_text = ''
  content_text = ''

  File.open(path).each_line do |line|
    if line.chomp == '---'
      fence_count += 1
    end

    if fence_count == 1
      front_matter_text += line
    else
      content_text += line
    end
  end

  front_matter = YAML.load front_matter_text

  # category becomes a tag
  old_category = front_matter['categories'][0].downcase
  front_matter['tags'].prepend old_category

  # craft becomes the new category
  front_matter['categories'][0] = 'craft'

  File.open(path, 'w') do |f|
    f.puts front_matter.to_yaml
    f.puts content_text
  end
end

I run it and add changes with -p to double check the output. It worked!

$ ruby migrate-craft.rb
$ git add -p
$ git commit -m 'Craft section front matter shift to craft category'

Really, that’s all the Ruby we need. The rest is dealing with git and other details manually.

I must specify that “craft” is an active category, since some categories represent archives that I do not want on the main navigation menu.

config.json

  "Params": {
    "activeCategories": [
      "craft",
      "marginalia",
      "programming",
      "tools"
    ]
  }

Move page bundles to content/post

Next I want to move content files from content/craft to content/post. You could do this sort of thing from the command line, but I just used GNOME Files.

I tell Git to delete the missing files with git rm -r content/craft then add the moved files under content/post.

Right. Let’s see how this builds.

$ hugo server -D
Building sites … ERROR 2018/05/25 20:31:05 error processing shortcode "_internal/shortcodes/ref.html" for page
"post/2018/interviewed-about-facebook/index.md": template: _internal/shortcodes/ref.html:1:73: executing
"_internal/shortcodes/ref.html" at <ref .Page (.Get 0)>: error calling ref: No page found with path or logical
name "craft/2018/my-new-boy-beanie/index.md".
ERROR 2018/05/25 20:31:05 error processing shortcode "_internal/shortcodes/ref.html" for page
"post/2018/my-new-boy-beanie/index.md": template: _internal/shortcodes/ref.html:1:73: executing
"_internal/shortcodes/ref.html" at <ref .Page (.Get 0)>: error calling ref: No page found with path or logical
name "craft/2018/a-couple-crochet-hats/index.md".
Total in 1039 ms
Error: Error building site: logged 2 error(s)

Oops. Fix the ref shortcodes in my content.

Handle section, category, and tag details

Anyways, the last little bit is just tidying. Move the old knitting, crochet, and drawing category branch bundles to corresponding tag folders.

Done?

I probably forgot something, but everything seems to work correctly.