Date formatting and locale

I wanted to add publication date to posts’ metadata, and render it in the page.

The published property of a post has two main functions. First, it is shown on the page. This requires locale-specific formatting. Second, by setting it to a future date it indicates that an article is not yet unpublished, so should be skipped when generating the site.

Date metadata

The post loader gets the published property from one of two places. It can be defined in the metadata at the top of the post:

title: Some post title
published: 2024-05-19

Body text starts here

The first exploits uses the schema feature of StrictYAML to tell it to interpret the published property as a datetime.

If the property is not specified, and the file name starts with a date (like 2024-05-19-date.markdown), then that date is used.

In both cases the date is expressed in the yyyy-mm-dd format described in RFC 3339.

Date formatting

Mustache does not directly support formatting dates, so I have come up with a bit of a kludge that should be OK until we get serious about internationalization one day.

When creating the context dictionary for generating the post, datetime values are represented by a dictionary with the following keys:

{
    "year": "2024",
    "month": "5",
    "day": "19",
    "month_2digits": "05",
    "day_2digits": "19",
    "month_name": "May",
    "iso_date": "2024-05-19"
}

The template uses this by treating the published property as an object:

{{# published }}
<time datetime="{{iso_date}}">{{day}} {{month_name}} {{year}}</time>
{{/ published }}

The month name comes from the locale database.

Hiding unpublished posts

While working on a new post the mismiy command will be running in watch mode so the drafts can be previewed in a browser. When generating a ‘production’ build for copying to the real server, the draft posts and all links to them should be omitted. The --drafts flag on the mismiy command makes it include unpublished posts. The --watch flag implies --drafts.

Generally publication dates are given without a time of day. We will assume that the time of day us 0:00 in this case.