Using "nikola" for static HTML generation

I'm keeping notes. Maybe later they'll be useful to someone else? I'm trying to use the nikola tag to collect musings, as well.

Wishlist

A thing that I'd like to automate are the commands

$ nikola new_post -d -e -f markdown
$ nikola new_page    -e -f markdown

I also have this nice sort of cobbled-together build script that seems to more aligned with my ideas about rebuilding than does nikola auto:

$ nikola build && while sleep 1 ; do
    echo -n -e \\r $(date +"%F %T :") "";
    if find . -type f -newer .doit.db.dat | grep -v '(cache|output)' ; then
         nikola build ;
fi ; done

I'd like to have a "watched tags" sort of a feature where I can include some little code snippet to produce an index of blog posts with that tag on a page. That might make it easier to collate ideas in one place.

Solved problems

Videos

For video, there isn't a Markdown syntax the way there is for images. Youtube videos will give you an embed link (example). For videos that I've actually downloaded, the HTML <video> tag is available (example).

Static landing page

By default the landing page is an index of recent posts. Changing that took a couple of tries. In conf.py:

• Put the blog index somewhere other than /index.html:

INDEX_PATH = 'posts'

• Put index.md in /pages, where it will get processed ... but tell nikola to relocate it to the top-level directory.

PAGES = (
    ("pages/index.md", "", "page.tmpl"),
    ("pages/*.md", "pages", "page.tmpl"),
    ...
)

Note that index.tmpl is the wrong template to make a page.