Website Reboot

Posted: 2022-08-17 #meta
2 minute read.

Introduction

Its been awhile since I have actually paid attention to this website, mainly life has been getting in the way, but more accurately, I hate writing for my website with my current toolchain. While the it is cool and useful, it ultimately is very bad for the kind of things I want to do.

The original generator was based off of a closed pull request on the landchad.net website. It seemed like a super cool way to generate websites from markdown. While for super simple sites, its very sufficient, my cases went beyond its usefulness.

The problems

The main problem with the old generator has to do with my blog and rss feeds. In the original generator, I had to create two scripts in order to create posts, aggregate them onto an index page, and finally create an rss feed. Rss is particularly annoying to do, since parsing markdown in shell is quite difficult (and stupid if I’m honest). I was only able to take a small portion of a post to put in a feed reader. The blog suffered from the same issues, in a lesser form.

What I use now

After lots of contemplation, I decided to use hugo. It has a mature userbase, its actively maintained, and it has some very nice features that improve the overall flow of writing and adding content.

• Markdown/Asciidoc/Others for content
• Page/Listing/New File templates with partials for “snippets”
• Article tags and organization by tags.
• Live reload server for testing.
• No complex tooling in the form of a programming language.

I was taking a look at nanoc, however, there was a few things that kept me from using it. Mainly, a lot of the templating and configuration was written in ruby, which I have no idea how to write. Sure I could learn the language (it would not be hard), but I would rather focus on adding content to my website, rather than writing templates. Its not that I wont give it a try, but seems to be a smarter choice to stick to hugo. That said, I want to try both nanoc and haunt at some point.

I could have also made my own static site generator (wooo.sh) but I would rather work on other more pressing projects than a static site generator.

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