The main issue with old generated blog structure was difficulty to supplement articles with pictures and code. All generated posts were placed into the root, like:

post-608859f7-a1a7-449b-b0c4-d649942412b0.html
tag-emacs.html
feed-emacs.atom

Origin of such structure: when you have flat structure it is easy to navigate between HTML pages with relative links, no need to worry about base path.

During the design I chose to store a post meta in a separate file:

• when you support several formats (RST/MD) each have own syntax for meta information
• MD parser is greedy, you have to parse entire file just to extract title, to build archive widget you have to parse all files!

Another decision was also to keep summary/excerpt in a separate file, otherwise you face the same problems:

• delimited between post body and excerpt would be proprietary extension for each format
• you have to parse full article just to find excerpts (which are necessary for index.html meaning releasing all articles!)

New structure is documented and then implemented.

I chose to place each post into separate directory so images and code could be placed nearby and referenced via relative path, like img/stats.png or code/java/App.java.

Other resources began to be stored structurally.

Together that made impossible to browse HTML pages using file: protocol as I started to reference to resources via absolute base path, basically every href= or src= became like:

href="/css/main.css"
href="/post/about-java/post.html
href="/tag/posix.html"
src="/js/main.js"

So I had to set local Web server (Lighttpd) and point it to build directory to test blog generator.

Static blog generator Blog4u is not yet done, still it can convert:

• RST, Markdown, TXT files into blog pages
• with Atom feed support
• with summary/excerpts support
• with navigation though the posts in chronological order

Upcoming work for static blog generator Blog4u is:

• avoid file parsing if size/mtime haven't changed
• code highlighting for MD
• extension syntax for bundled images & code

For the blog itself I plan automate publishing a bit by setting hg hook on push.