Markdown It Find and Replace as Plugin

Project Scope and ToDos

1. Static Site Generator that can build the blog and let me host it on Github Pages
2. I want to write posts in Markdown because I'm lazy, it's easy, and it is how I take notes now.
3. I don't want to spend a ton of time doing design work. I'm doing complicated designs for other projects, so I want to pull a theme I like that I can rely on someone else to keep up.
4. Once it gets going, I want template changes to be easy.
5. It should be as easy as Jekyll, so I need to be able to build it using GitHub Actions, where I can just commit a template change or Markdown file and away it goes. If I can't figure this out than fk it, just use Jekyll.
6. I require it to be used by a significant percent of my professional peers so I can get easy answers when something goes wrong.
7. I want source maps. This is a dev log site which means whatever I do with it should be easy for other developers to read.

• Also the sitemap plugin looks cool. Should grab that later.

• Also this TOC plugin mby?

• Use Data Deep Merge in this blog.

• Decide if I want to render the CSS fancier than just a base file and do per-template splitting.

• How do I cachebreak files on the basis of new build events? Datetime? site.github.build_revision is how Jekyll accomplishes this, but is there a way to push that into the build process for Eleventy?

• Make link text look less shitty. It looks like it is a whole, lighter, font.

• Code blocks do not have good syntax highlighting. I want good syntax highlighting.

• Build a Markdown-it plugin to take my typing shortcuts [prob, b/c, ...?] and expand them on build.

• Should I explore some shortcodes?

• Order projects listing by last posted blog in that project

• Limit the output of home page post lists to a specific number of posts

• Show the latest post below the site intro on the homepage.

• Tags pages with Pagination

• Posts should be able to support a preview header image that can also be shown on post lists.

• Create a Markdown-It plugin that reads the project's repo URL off the folder data file and renders commit messages with links to the referenced commit. (Is this even possible?) (Is there a way to do it with eleventy instead?)

• Create Next Day/Previous Day links on each post / Next/Previous post on post templates from projects

• Tags should be in the sidebar of articles and link to tag pages

• Create a skiplink for the todo section (or would this be better served with the ToC plugin?) - Yes it would be!

• Add a Things I Learned section to the project pages that are the things I learned from that specific project.

• Add a technical reading log to the homepage

• Hide empty sections.

• Add byline to post pages

• Have table of contents attach to sidebar bottom on mobile

• Support dark mode

• Social Icons

• SEO/Social/JSON-LD HEAD data

Day 40

Ok, so I want to make my pretty simple but very useful Markdown-it short phrase replacer into a stand alone NPM package that others can use.

I need to set up the project, add the package.json file, the .npmignore file, the README and the other chunks of the initial setup.

The other thing I need to do is set it up so that a developer can pass in the patterns and replacement rules. So no more using a function outside of the exported function. Instead I need to let others pull it in. I also want to add some test coverage. I've always used Jest for testing, but never Mocha, so let's try doing that! I'll review the docs.

Good thing I wish they called out with more emphasis:

Passing arrow functions (aka “lambdas”) to Mocha is discouraged. Lambdas lexically bind this and cannot access the Mocha context.

I want to start testing, but that will mean a devDependency for markdown-it. It also made me realize I need to define a peerDependencies object.

Skip code block ▼

"peerDependencies": {
  "markdown-it": "*"
}

I want to test that the errors being thrown are working as expected, so I'm going to grab expect.js.

Using that I need to initiate the function I want to dump and error into the expect statement. And I need it to explicitly match a regex pattern (feeding a string in apparently doesn't work).

Ok, this works!

Skip code block ▼

it("should not initiate without an array", function () {
	expect(() => mdProcessor(options).use(plugin, {})).to.throwException(
		/Markdown-It-Find-and-Replace requires that options\.replaceRules be an array\./
	);
});

Let's throw some more tests on there!

Ok, it works.

Oh, and in writing the tests I realized I don't have a setup for when it starts a sentence or token content or when it ends one! I can fix that though with a few more regexs.

Ok, plugin looks good. Tests work. You know what's sort of strange, I've never created an NPM module that I've also published before. I guess this is the first time! Let's go!

I already have an NPM account I created earlier, so that part is easy.

I'll reformat my author property to match their requirements.

I tried pulling it into this project and it looks like it works, so I think the code is good to go.

npm publish --access public

Ok, that was easy!

I'll pull it in to this project and see if that version works.

And it does!

Awesome, made it into a module that hopefully some other people will find useful!

I'll add some documentation and update that and we're done! Very useful!

npm publish to update the package listing.

Markdown It plugin package is live and ready for others to use!

git commit -am "Switching to use my newly published markdown-it plugin"