𓏞מילים דיגיטליות

More than a year ago, I’ve built a website for the community garden by the Jerusalem Natural History Museum. Building is fun, but maintaining — that is manually converting each and every mail Amnon sends into a form Pelican can read, as well as saving the attachments and link them — is unimaginative and boring, and therefore… how shall I put it… I wasn’t very active with the updates (in fact I rather abandoned the website).

But wait a moment, Juda, isn’t that’s exactly what computers are meant for, doing tedious, unimaginative, boring tasks? They are, so that is what I wanted to do. After searching the web, the closest thing I could find was JekyllMail; it seems to work well for 88 people, but for me it has several disadvantages:

• It’s non-generic design is for Jekyll (not a big deal: it is easy to write a conversion script, and I’m quite sure someone already have written such a script).
• It isn’t static: instead of working on local files, it connects to servers and does stuff which should be done by small, sharp tools (in our case, OfflineIMAP and Git).
• It assumes an exclusive mail address, which is IMHO just an unnecessary complication.
• It works with POP3, which I just hate, when IMAP is well-supported.

Therefore, I wrote a small tool, named mail2staticsite¹, which does a very simple task:

• It takes the mail within a certain Maildir,
• parses and processes it (for example, it removes prefixes such s re: and fwd: from the subject),
• saves the attachments and links them (images are embedded (<img>) and other files are just linked (<a>)),
• it spits out the result into local directories which can be read by Pelican, Jekyll or any other static site generator.

Right now it works fine for the community garden², but there is a lot to be done. If you want to join in and improve the code, you are welcome ☺