Daily Writing

This repo hosts an open source project that let you create a website presenting daily writings, it was created with challenges like Writober or Writever in mind, but it's not tied to a specific challenge.

Daily Writing mainly turns a bunch of markdown files (one per writing, at most one per day), a configuration file, and a directory of static files into a static HTML website that can be deployed.

Daily Writing offers various features, such as:

• A page for each writing and a homepage. A menu displaying a calendar with all the writing for all months.
• Each day is linked to a "prompt" (as in writever/writober prompt), and can have a title distinct from the prompt. This is useful if the title of your writing isn't excatly the prompt you were given for the day. Also, if your prompts are in a given language and the title is the prompt you translated to your language, it's nice. The prompt will be displayed in the menu over the title.
• A given writing can span over multiple days and their associated prompts (e.g. if you're late), and the calendar will reflect that. Those days may even be non-consecutive. It's assumed that the title will be composed of multiple parts each related to the associated prompts.
• Each day in a month is linked to a unique color, and the calendar is colored accordingly. The homepage displays all the month's colors.
• Posts can be written in advance and will only be published of their date.
• Links to the previous and next writings, for binge-reading.
• Most metadata can be extracted from the name of the file and the writing markdown title, but can then be normalized to frontmatter. Having a frontmatter is necessary when using a CMS editor. Normalization also applies Markdown formatting.
• Writings spanning multiple days will have a gradient between the colors of the days.
• A CMS, at /admin to update your writings and the site settings directly from your browser.
• A RSS feed.
• Nice preview images when you post links to social networks.
• Discreet links to the GitHub source of each writing, to ease online edition or typo reporting.
• Privacy-minded Google fonts, downloaded and optimized at build time so that you can get various fonts without offering your reader's data to Google (damn, that was a mess to code)
• Dark mode. No light mode. Contributions welcome on that.
• Support for extra custom CSS. If you want to add a light mode but just for yourself.
• Support of various locales, for date formats. Apart from dates and numbers, all the words that appear on the interface are configurable, so technically, we support all languages that Unicode supports.
• If you rename a file but want to keep its original URL too, you can add aliases.
• Site is 100% usable without javascript for users.
• Callouts, with any kind and an optional title (see Callouts).

Author's personal undying love of handcrafted open source and meticulous yak shaving went into this project. He likes to think that it shows.

An example:

https://writober.ewjoach.im/ is deployed from https://github.com/ewjoachim/writober, using this project.

Extraction rules

From a single file without a frontmatter, these are the informations being extracted. Say the file is at 2026/10/03-hello.md and its content starts with a title that says: # 03 - Bonjour. The system will find that this writing covers a single day (2026-10-03), its prompt is "hello" and its official title is "Bonjour".

Say the file is at 2026/10/03-hello-darkness.md and its content starts with a title that says: # 03&04 - Bonjour, Obscurité. The system will find that this writing covers 2 days:

• 2026-10-03 for which the prompt is hello and the title Bonjour,
• 2026-10-04 for which the prompt is darkness and the title Obscurité.

You can always override those values by editing the frontmatter.

Callouts

Blockquotes starting with [!kind] become callouts, using the Obsidian syntax, a superset of GitHub alerts:

> [!memory] A long time ago
> In a galaxy far, far away.

Any kind is accepted. The title is optional and defaults to the capitalized kind. The callout is rendered with GitHub's classes (markdown-alert markdown-alert-memory, and markdown-alert-title for the title), so you can style each kind with extra CSS. Anywhere else, the callout degrades to a plain blockquote.

Add - or + right after the kind to make the callout foldable, closed or open by default. It's then rendered as a <details> element, with the title as its <summary>:

> [!spoiler]- Click to reveal
> The butler did it.

Installation

Github

• Go to daily-writing-template and follow the instructions to get started (we'll take care of most of the heavy lifting for you).

Elsewhere

(Feel free to contribute installation instructions for other platforms).

Configuration

Your website can be configured through either:

• daily-writing.toml,
• pyproject.toml within the [tool.daily-writing] section
• environments variables,
• CLI flags.

The same options are available in all ways, but they're not spelled out exactly the same way. In the toml configuration and environment variables, words are separated by _ (underscores). In the flags, they're separated by - (dashes). Environment variables are all upper case and prefixed with DAILY_WRITING_

Examples:

• daily-writing.toml: server_url = "https://writober.ewjoach.im"
• environments variables: SERVER_URL="https://writober.ewjoach.im"
• CLI flags: --server-url="https://writober.ewjoach.im"

The easiest and most up-to-date way to learn about every configuration option is through: daily-writing -h. Feel free to consult daily-writing.toml for a working example.

CLI

There are 2 main subcommands:

• daily-writing build builds the website
• daily-writing serve launches a local development server that autobuilds the website and auto-reload pages in your browser when changes are detected.

To preview writings before publishing them, pass --include-drafts to render writings marked as draft, and --max-date to render writings dated in the future:

$ daily-writing --include-drafts --max-date=2099-12-31 serve

CI/CD Deployment

Solutions like GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, GitLab Pages, etc will make your life easier, as you can edit the markdown files online or push them through git, and have them get redeployed automatically daily and upon changes.

Here's a GitHub Actions workflow example:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron: "1 22,23 * 10 *" # Adjust to whenever relvant to you

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v5

      - name: Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v5

      - uses: astral-sh/setup-uv@v6

      - name: Sphinx build
        run: uv run daily-writing build

      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v4
        with:
          path: _build

  # Deployment job
  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

Adding new content

Manual

Add and edit your markdown files in the repository via Git or via your platform's Web interface.

Online, with Sveltia

Daily-Writing can come with a CMS, allowing you to get a nice admin interface that doesn't require to interact with Git.

How to avoid using a GitHub Token to log in

While not strictly necessary, it's possible to log into the web interface without a token, though it requires a bit more steps. You will need a Cloudflare account.

Follow the instructions from this repository.