LiveJrnl

Render a jrnl.sh journal as a static site. LiveJrnl uses Jinja for templating. Inspired by jrnl-render.

Why the name LiveJrnl? I was feeling nostalgic for LiveJournal circa 2004 and wanted to recreate that experience. I've used jrnl for a few years now for jotting down small thoughts and simply love the simplicity of it. I also like puns and wordplay.

Disclaimer

This project mostly follows the Unix philosophy by only doing one thing - generate files based on the json output from jrnl. If you use a build script to build your site, you're gonna have a good time.

There's also no real error checking. Make sure all of your paths are writeable, your journal is accessible and populated, and please don't be an idiot by running this as root.

Install

Clone the repository and open the folder
Create a virtual environment python -m venv env
Activate source env/bin/activate
Install requirements pip install -r requirements.txt
Deactivate deactivate

Usage

Navigate to the install folder
Activate the virtual environment source env/bin/activate
Read the help python livejrnl.py --help
When done, deactivate

To view my personal build script that builds the site, RSS feed, and CSS, you can look at the livejrnl-builder repo.

Templates

All features of Jinja are available with no restrictions, even extensions!

Template Variables

The template variables LiveJrnl uses are:

Variable	Type	Description
`{{ entries }}`	Array	The list of entries
`{{ config }}`	Dictionary	Additional configuration variables
`{{ config.cutoff }}`	Integer	The maximum number of entry items to display

The template variables for individual entries are:

Variable	Type	Description
`{{ entry.title }}`	String	The title of the entry
`{{ entry.date }}`	String	The date stamp of the entry
`{{ entry.time }}`	String	The time stamp of the entry
`{{ entry.body }}`	String	The contents of the entry

Example

Print a list of entries and their contents, beginning with the newest:

{% for entry in entries|reverse %}
	<p>{{ entry.title }}</p>
	<p>{{ entry.date }} at {{ entry.time }}</p>
	<p>{{ entry.body }}</p>
	</br>
{% endfor %}

Configuration

You can pass a JSON configuration file to the script with some variables your template can use. You can access them by using {{ config.key_name }} in your template

If no configuration is passed, LiveJrnl uses the following defaults:

{
	"title": "Welcome to my LiveJrnl",
	"base_url": "https://localhost",
	"description": "Write a bit about your website here.",
	"author": "Ashley Robin",
	"author_link": "https://localhost/arobin",
	"year": "2023",
	"language": "en",
	"rss_language": "en-gb"
}

For convenience, I've included a sample config file that you can edit.

Known Issues

If you have a large journal with a resource heavy template, you're gonna have a bad time. This outputs every entry on a single page because I didn't bother to implement pagination at all.

Pagination is not a priority because this whole thing is mostly for me, and I personally plan to "archive" my journal every year by copying the output files to their own year folder, so the number of entries shouldn't reach a point where performance and file size is an issue.

License

AGPL 3.0