Several days ago I was casually browsing awesomness of Github when I saw this project by koush, and instantly understood that’s the blogging flow I could use - write in sublime and publish/deploy from terminal.

I had to do some cleanup there, update & fix some dependencies and rewrite parts of it to a better language. Later, I’ve created a new Heroku instance, moved my domain to a heroku Add-on called pointDNS, did git push heroku, and it worked great :). I still have some styling to do, though…

So let’s go through it step by step (WARNING that may be boring if you don’t like details):

Cleanup

There was quite a bunch of code I wasn’t going to use.

package.json

I have moved dependencies from being hardcoded in node_modules folder to a proper dependencies section in package.json file. I prefer stuff on CDN’s, so I had to re-link some things, like Bootstrap or jQuery (required by, but not bundled with Bootstrap).

I’ve restructured some view files, removed almost all styles and left only two .less files with very small changes to a default Bootstrap theme.

Upgrades

From the start I wanted to use only the newest packages, and as it usually is, some things weren’t yet compatible…

poet

First problem I’ve encountered was an instant crash poet was experiencing when I tried friending it with express v4.x, where app.locals is no longer a function, and I had to handle it like this (I’ve used underscore, only because it was already required there). As I didn’t wanted to wait for someone to merge my PR, I decided to link to own repo in package.json.

After that express hit me with a lot of structure changes - they’ve decided to move a lot of stuff out of the main repo. So I had to add dependencies in package.json, and require them accordingly in my app.coffee file.

markdown + highlighting

Originally markdown was used, but it had no proper highlighting hooks (some crazy regular expression was being used), it didn’t have support for GFC (empty lines in code blocks were breaking formatting of an entire post) and actual formatting was happening in a python-pygments library, that was accessed by some other python files, and… Yeah, I simplified this by using a surprisingly great marked npm module, that was insanely easy to integrate with highlight.js:

marked.setOptions
  highlight: (code, lang) ->
    hljs.highlight(lang, code).value

Obviously it couldn’t be that easy and some problems had to emerge: code block background was always white, and if I wrapped code with a div with .hljs class, background had wrong shape. But one quick PR solved that isse for me.

Heroku

Deploying on Heroku, was way easier than I expected. Basically the only two things I had to do was, to create a Procfile containing only: web: npm start. And add coffee-script dependency to my package.json file, since I prefer running coffeescript directly than compiling it to js, and then running it.

Little Things

I hate when things annoy me with their little warnings, and so was html-to-text module:

npm WARN package.json html-to-text@0.0.8 No repository field.

Luckily one little PR solved this issue.