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I really enjoy Fabien's articles - really great fascinating stuff. I have to wonder about the choice of custom PHP to generate the pages, especially if you are

I really enjoy Fabien's articles - really great fascinating stuff. I have to wonder about the choice of custom PHP to generate the pages, especially if you are going to start from scratch when the intention is drastic simplicity? I can understand the rationale of picking PHP many years ago to hand-roll something, but these days there are a lot of excellent static site generators which might be a better choice? E.g. Jekyll is very simple and flexible in my experience, and you can hand-roll some HTML + CSS and get something looking and behaving (e.g. URL structure) how you like very easily. I have had less success with Hugo (in terms of URL structure etc), but I know a lot of people prefer it to Jekyll for its golang-based compile performance. Am I missing something for the rationale for PHP here? It would seem that most of the rules here are editorial/design decisions rather than technical restrictions really. I guess perhaps there is the legacy issue of loads of old articles that are written in PHP that would need to be migrated, but that sounds like something that can be trivially automated and would only need to be done once.

as1mov 7y ago
Not sure about the OP, but I have a small devlog which is basically just a Bash script which I run whenever I need to write a new post. The script takes a bunch of markdown files in a folder and spits out HTML files (common index.html + files of each individual post) with a header/footer. This HTML is then served using a web server. I just tried visiting the Jekyll website to see how to get started, the documentation page has the following under the Getting Started section -- 1) Install Ruby, Ruby Gems. 2) Understand what Gem, Gemfiles, Bundler(?) are. 3) Tells me about it's community for some reason. 4) Finally there's a page which tells me how to make a 'Hello World' blog. 5) 10 more pages explaining what Liquid, layouts, includes, datafiles, assets, deployment are. 6) I still don't know how to make a new post. Most static site generators have too much of cognitive load. I just want a bunch of plain HTML files generated (ideally in <1s + no JS) from a bunch of markdown files, I don't really care for 99% of the features these things have. I would rather spend a few hours a write a simple script to do it myself instead of wading through the documentation looking for the relevant parts.
- discreditable 7y ago
  I left Octopress (a flavor jekyll) for those reasons[1]. Pelican[2] is what I use now. It takes a dir of markdown files and makes a decent website. It was even easy for me to write a no-nonsense theme without being good at python. [1] https://brashear.me/blog/2017/07/30/migration-from-octopress-to-pelican/ https://brashear.me/blog/2017/07/30/migration-from-octopress... [2] https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/
jjjbokma 7y ago
Not the OP, but I made my own static site generator because it's a) not that hard and b) a very rewarding project. Example site: https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/ The code is available on github: https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog

as1mov 7y ago

Not sure about the OP, but I have a small devlog which is basically just a Bash script which I run whenever I need to write a new post. The script takes a bunch of markdown files in a folder and spits out HTML files (common index.html + files of each individual post) with a header/footer. This HTML is then served using a web server. I just tried visiting the Jekyll website to see how to get started, the documentation page has the following under the Getting Started section -- 1) Install Ruby, Ruby Gems. 2) Understand what Gem, Gemfiles, Bundler(?) are. 3) Tells me about it's community for some reason. 4) Finally there's a page which tells me how to make a 'Hello World' blog. 5) 10 more pages explaining what Liquid, layouts, includes, datafiles, assets, deployment are. 6) I still don't know how to make a new post. Most static site generators have too much of cognitive load. I just want a bunch of plain HTML files generated (ideally in <1s + no JS) from a bunch of markdown files, I don't really care for 99% of the features these things have. I would rather spend a few hours a write a simple script to do it myself instead of wading through the documentation looking for the relevant parts.

discreditable 7y ago
I left Octopress (a flavor jekyll) for those reasons[1]. Pelican[2] is what I use now. It takes a dir of markdown files and makes a decent website. It was even easy for me to write a no-nonsense theme without being good at python. [1] https://brashear.me/blog/2017/07/30/migration-from-octopress-to-pelican/ https://brashear.me/blog/2017/07/30/migration-from-octopress... [2] https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/

jjjbokma 7y ago

Not the OP, but I made my own static site generator because it's a) not that hard and b) a very rewarding project. Example site: https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/ The code is available on github: https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog