So I started to write my own blog using Phoenix, and I'd like to use markdown files to store my posts. To parse the markdown files we can use Earmark, however, Earmark does not support markdown file with frontmatter yet.

Frontmatter is a ting block of YAML code that sits in the front of a markdown file and stores some metadata in it, for exmaple, we can do title, date and excerpt. An instance of a frontmatter block would be something lile below,

---
title: Write A Blog from Zero
date: 2023-01-02
excerpt: Writing a blog from scratch is fun!
---

We can use :yaml_elixir to parse YAML code in Elixir, and we'll use YamlElixir.read_from_string/1 for this job,

yaml_string = """
title: Write A Blog from Zero
date: 2023-01-02
excerpt: Writing a blog from scratch is fun!
"""
YamlElixir.read_from_string(yaml_string)

We will get the following output,

{:ok,
 %{
   "date" => "2023-01-02",
   "excerpt" => "Writing a blog from scratch is fun!",
   "title" => "Write A Blog from Zero"
 }}

Another thing we might be interested in is permalink, for example, this post's permalink is set to blog-from-scratch, so the permanent link to this post is https://uwucocoa.moe/post/blog-from-scratch.

Well, sometimes I'm too lazy to come up with a good permalink, so I also wrote a function that automatically generates a permalink from the filename.

Then we can use the frontmatter we just generated in Phoenix template files.

<article class="column post-section-title">
  <h2><a href={"/post/#{@post.frontmatter["permalink"]}"}><%= @post.frontmatter["title"] %></a></h2>
  <h3><%= @post.frontmatter["date"] %></h3>
  <div class="post">
    <%= raw @post.content %>
  </div>
</article>

Is there anything else I'd like to mention? Probably not...? There are definitely a lot of things I could do to further improve this blog, but it looks good at the moment. And since it's meant for my own use, and I don't really write that many posts, so the performance is not a concern for me, at least it's not a problem yet.

Anyway, happy 2023?