Frontmatter is the metadata format for Markdown and YAML that we can use in MkDocs and many other tools. While we could parse the metadata on our own, tools like Python Frontmatter are a much simpler way to do it. Let us see how this works.
The Social plug-in of MkDocs Material gives us the nice images with the titles of our blog posts when we share them on social media.
Those images are also part of the RSS feed, but once more not in a correct format. Let us see how we can fix that.
With the common problems out of our way, we can now explore some helpful resources for MkDocs that makes writing blog posts a lot simpler.
Now that we have fixed the RSS feed, we can move on to two other common errors you may encounter. They are easy to fix, but first you need to know what the problem is.
The RSS feed plug-in for MkDocs is a bit of a troublemaker. While it works, there is a lot of room for improvement. One big disappointment is the handling of internal links. Unfortunately, the MkDocs pipeline is nothing you want to dive into and so I had to work around the problem.
When you are new to MkDocs you may find yourself in front of a few annoying problems. Before you turn your back on this tool, you should try the following troubleshooting tips.
Now that the posts for Python Friday are on the new PythonFriday.dev domain, I need a way to redirect the visitors from the Improve & Repeat blog to the new location. Let us write a script to create the necessary HTTP redirects.
With Material for MkDocs I found a valid alternative for WordPress. There is only one large obstacle left: How do we get the blog posts from WordPress to Markdown?
Last week we searched for viable candidates to run a blog with a static site generator and Material for MkDocs got in the first place. It is now time to check if the documented functionality is really there and works as expected.
I have been using WordPress for my two blogs for 15 years now. While it is still a good tool, I am not very excited about the AI strategy of Automattic Inc, the company behind WordPress. I fear that they will stop spending time on improving WordPress and instead accelerate the enshittification of their platform. I guess it is now time to look for alternatives and see if static website generators could be a viable alternative for a blog.