Getting started with coppice

coppice turns a folder of markdown into a small personal site: a home page with an animation, posts with sidenotes, a list of writings, pages, galleries, docs and a feed. This post is an example, to read and then delete; the docs are where the details live, and this is the short way through them.

Four steps

1. Build it. With Go installed, clone the repository and run go run . -serve :8000. The site is at localhost:8000, and builds again whenever you save a file. Getting started has the rest.
2. Make it yours. Every setting is in config.toml, with a comment saying what it does: the site's name and address, the links on the home page, the animation, the colours and the fonts. Settings goes through each.
3. Write. A post is a markdown file in content/posts/, with a title and a date at its top. Pages, posts and docs says what goes where, and writing what can go inside.
4. Publish. public/ is the whole site, ready for any static host, or for one that builds it from git on every push. Deploying shows how.

When something's wrong

coppice would rather stop than build a broken site. A typo in a setting, a post without a date, a link to a page that isn't there: the build names the file and the problem, and with -serve the last good site stays up while you fix it.A picture without a description doesn't stop it, but it's reported, so you can describe it for those who can't see it.