On my front page I display a sort of sitemap for my blog. Since the structure of the site is not very hierarchical, I decided to show pages and posts as a graph along with their tags. To do so, I created a mini plugin for the Pelican static blog engine. The plugin is essentially a sort of callback that gets executed when the engine has generated all posts and pages from their markdown files. I then simply take the results and write them out in a json format that d3.js understands (a list of nodes and a list of edges indexed on node positions in their list).

The plugin’s source code is available here on github. It you’re interested in the Pelican blog engine, check it out here.