Prelims

Front matter post-processor for static site generators.

Overview

Prelims eases updating YAML front matter of the static site generator contents (e.g., Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo).

You can extract keywords based on TF-IDF weighting, generate a list of recommended posts by content-based filtering, and even apply arbitrary custom functions to update front matters on-the-fly.

Example

Below is an original front matter for "User-Centricity Matters: My Reading List from RecSys 2021" at takuti.me:

---
categories: [Recommender Systems]
date: 2021-10-05
lang: en
title: 'User-Centricity Matters: My Reading List from RecSys 2021'
---

Once a Python script is executed against all the posts, new metadata recommendations and keywords are dynamically generated and inserted as:

---
categories: [Recommender Systems]
date: 2021-10-05
keywords: [recsys, bias, papers, wordcloud, echo, user, recommendations, metrics,
  recommender, users]
lang: en
recommendations: [/note/recsys-2021-echo-chambers-and-filter-bubbles/, /note/recsys-wordcloud/,
  /note/ethical-challenges-in-recommender-systems/]
title: 'User-Centricity Matters: My Reading List from RecSys 2021'
---

Installation

$ pip install prelims

Usage

Assume your posts are under /path/to/posts where a static site generator uses as a document root:

posts
├── article-aaa.md
├── ...
└── article-zzz.md

Here, the following script reads all .md and .html files in the folder, builds recommendations, and update each post's front matter:

from prelims import StaticSitePostsHandler
from prelims.processor import Recommender


handler = StaticSitePostsHandler('/path/to/posts')
handler.register_processor(
	Recommender(permalink_base='/post')
)
handler.execute()

For instance, a front matter of article-aaa.md may eventually become:

---
date: 2022-01-01
title: Awesome Blog Post
recommendations: [/post/article-zzz/, /post/article-abc/, /post/article-xyz/]
keywords: [happy, beer, coffee, park, ...]
---

You can run the script as a pre-commit hook and automate the process e.g., with lint-staged:

$ npm install -D lint-staged

{
  ...
  "lint-staged": {
    "posts/*.{md,html}": [
      "python ./scripts/prelims.py",
      "git add -u posts/"
    ]
  },
  ...
}

Limitations

• The author is testing and using Prelims mainly with Hugo. Although the tool is intended to be applicable to a variety of static site generators, there must be several edge cases that won't work properly due to unique behaviors associated with a specific generator.
• We assume there are hundreds of posts at most, not thousands. Every single post is sequentially processed one-by-one, and the Recommender module, for example, trains a model from scratch every time. As the number of posts increases, you may encounter scalability issues.