External pages in Nikola tag map / timeline / etc?

[jwise]

Hi all,

I'm migrating my long-beleaguered web presence to the static site generation future, and one thing I'm excited about is being able to write things and then have them automatically show up in tag maps, chronological post indices, etcetera.

As I was migrating content over, I was thinking that it would be cool if all of my artifacts over the last handful of decades could be represented in chronological indices, without necessarily having to port them into the SSG directly. For instance, I have some stuff still on Dreamwidth, and some photo galleries with other canonical URLs that I don't plan to import into Nikola, and I'd like for these all to have metadata represented in Nikola, but not any generated pages.

For extremely small and limited things, where I want to create a small list of "favorites", I have something like this:

Here are some favorites and/or classics.

{{% post-list post_type=all tags=favorites template=favorites.tmpl %}}{{% /post-list %}}

And then in templates/favorites.tmpl:

## -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
<%block name="content">
<!-- Begin post-list ${post_list_id} -->
<div id="${post_list_id}" class="post-list">
    %if posts:
    <ul class="post-list">
        % for post in posts:
            <li class="post-list-item">
            ${post.formatted_date("MMMM yyyy")|h}
            &nbsp;
            %if post.meta('link'):
              <a href="${post.meta('link')}">
            %else:
              <a href="${post.permalink(lang)}">
            %endif
            ${post.title(lang)|h}</a>
            %if post.meta('why-favorite'):
            -- ${post.meta('why-favorite')|h}
            %endif
            </li>
        % endfor
    </ul>
    %endif
</div>
<!-- End post-list ${post_list_id} -->
</%block>

And, finally, a "stub metadata file", pages/external/near-miss-data-loss.md:

<!--
.. title: A near-miss data loss event
.. date: 2012-02-03 04:06:44 UTC-04:00
.. tags: favorites
.. category: 
.. link: https://joshua0.dreamwidth.org/25045.html
.. why-favorite: or, how I accidentally paved over a machine
.. description:
.. type: external
-->

But this still does not really solve the problem of making that link: be the canonical URL in other indices -- and convincing Nikola to skip generating the output file.

Does anyone have any ideas for how I could achieve this effect in post lists all over Nikola, not just in carefully-hacked templates?

Thanks,
joshua

[ralsina]

You may want to look at the continuous_import plugin, I use that to keep goodreads and youtube content mirrored into nikola

…

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 4:42 AM Joshua Wise ***@***.***> wrote: Hi all, I'm migrating my long-beleaguered web presence to the static site generation future, and one thing I'm excited about is being able to write things and then have them automatically show up in tag maps, chronological post indices, etcetera. As I was migrating content over, I was thinking that it would be cool if *all* of my artifacts over the last handful of decades could be represented in chronological indices, without necessarily having to port them into the SSG directly. For instance, I have some stuff still on Dreamwidth, and some photo galleries with other canonical URLs that I don't plan to import into Nikola, and I'd like for these all to have metadata represented in Nikola, but not any generated pages. For extremely small and limited things, where I want to create a small list of "favorites", I have something like this: Here are some favorites and/or classics. {{% post-list post_type=all tags=favorites template=favorites.tmpl %}}{{% /post-list %}} And then in templates/favorites.tmpl: ## -*- coding: utf-8 -*- <%block name="content"> <!-- Begin post-list ${post_list_id} --> <div id="${post_list_id}" class="post-list"> %if posts: <ul class="post-list"> % for post in posts: <li class="post-list-item"> ${post.formatted_date("MMMM yyyy")|h} &nbsp; %if post.meta('link'): <a href="${post.meta('link')}"> %else: <a href="${post.permalink(lang)}"> %endif ${post.title(lang)|h}</a> %if post.meta('why-favorite'): -- ${post.meta('why-favorite')|h} %endif </li> % endfor </ul> %endif </div> <!-- End post-list ${post_list_id} --> </%block> And, finally, a "stub metadata file", pages/external/near-miss-data-loss.md: <!-- .. title: A near-miss data loss event .. date: 2012-02-03 04:06:44 UTC-04:00 .. tags: favorites .. category: .. link: https://joshua0.dreamwidth.org/25045.html .. why-favorite: or, how I accidentally paved over a machine .. description: .. type: external --> But this still does not really solve the problem of making that link: be the canonical URL in other indices -- and convincing Nikola to skip generating the output file. Does anyone have any ideas for how I could achieve this effect in post lists all over Nikola, not just in carefully-hacked templates? Thanks, joshua — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3861>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAAMKZH6VCY2B673SRBMH33TUAODAVCNFSM6AAAAACHA5NWTSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43ERDJONRXK43TNFXW4OZYHEZDENBTGE> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[jwise]

Hm, interesting, though I think that this is actually the inverse of what I want. I want to have the external references be the authoritative thing (i.e., post.permalink() is always the external URL), with hand-crafted metadata on my site to link to the external references. But continuous_import seems like it generates files that have semantic content (e.g., goodreads.tmpl), and makes the authoritative URL part of the generated blog, and then uses automatic metadata to fill them in?

[jwise]

Ok, I implemented this as #3862 / #3863.