pelican-dynamic

Pelican dynamic makes it easy to embed custom CSS and JS into individual Pelican blog articles.

Why?

Have you ever wanted to embed a dynamic D3 visualzation in your Pelican blog post? Me too. This makes it easy to do via the metadata tags for each article.

How

To install the plugin, follow the instructions on the Pelican plugin page. My settings look like the following:

PLUGIN_PATH = 'pelican-plugins'
PLUGINS = ['pelican_dynamic']

Next, create js and css directories in your content directory:

website/
├── content
│   ├── js/
│   │   └── d3_vis_1.js
│   │   └── d3_vis_2.js
│   ├── css/
│   │   └── d3_styles.css
│   ├── article1.rst
│   ├── cat/
│   │   └── article2.md
│   └── pages
│       └── about.md
└── pelican.conf.py

and then add each resource as a comma-separated file name in the Scripts and Styles tags:

Title: Pelican blog post with D3
Date: 2013-11-24
Category: Blog
Tags: D3
Slug: awesome-d3-vis
Author: Rob Story
Summary:  Pelican blog post with D3
D3:
Scripts: d3_vis_1.js, d3_vis_2.js
Styles: d3_styles.css

The D3: tag is a convenience method that will load a minified version of D3. All of the JS and CSS will live in corresponding js and css folders in your output folder.

Finally, in your base template (likely named base.html), you need to add the following in your head tags:

{% if article %}
    {% if article.styles %}
        {% for style in article.styles %}
{{ style }}
        {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
{% endif %}

and the following after your body tags:

{% if article %}
    {% if article.scripts %}
        {% for script in article.scripts %}
{{ script }}
        {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
{% endif %}

So, in the template I use for my blog (Flasky), the base template now looks like the following:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noticia+Text:400,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

    <title>{% block title %} {{SITENAME}} {% endblock %}</title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/css/style.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/css/pygments.css" type="text/css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/css/font-awesome.css" type="text/css"/>
    {% if article %}
        {% if article.styles %}
            {% for style in article.styles %}
    {{ style }}
            {% endfor %}
        {% endif %}
    {% endif %}
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class=container>
        {% block header %}
            {% include "header.html" %}
        {% endblock %}

        <div class="content">
        {% block content %} {% endblock %}
        </div>

        {% block footer %}
            {% include "footer.html" %}
        {% endblock %}
    </div>
    {% include 'googleanalytics.html' %}
    {% include 'piwik.html' %}
  </body>
    {% if article %}
        {% if article.scripts %}
            {% for script in article.scripts %}
    {{ script }}
            {% endfor %}
        {% endif %}
    {% endif %}
</html>

That's it! Run your standard make html or make publish commands and your JSS/CSS will be moved and ref'd in the right places.

Using D3 in a Blog Post

With Markdown, this is pretty easy. Just add the raw HTML for your chart element in the middle of your markdown text:

This is going to be a blog post about D3. Here is my chart: 

<div class="d3-chart"></div>

Isn't that a nice looking chart up there?

Then with D3, make sure you're selecting that element:

var svg = d3.select(".d3-chart").append("svg")

Ensure that your D3 is loaded after your body tags (as outlined above) so that it selects an existing element on the page.

kjellmf / pelican_dynamic

pelican-dynamic

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How

Using D3 in a Blog Post

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