4 ms·

> Jekyll's becoming increasingly complicated to work with in $CURRENT_YEAR due to increasingly-out-of-date components, so I'm trying to decide between Fossil's

by sofixa 2y ago

> Jekyll's becoming increasingly complicated to work with in $CURRENT_YEAR due to increasingly-out-of-date components, so I'm trying to decide between Fossil's wiki functionality¹ v. Scroll² (both of which seem to be right up my alley) as the migration path; If I may propose an alternative, I'm extremely happy with Hugo as a static site generator. It's a statically compiled Go binary so you can keep using whatever version you want forever (or update to get new features), and it's simple with optional complexity. It works fine for the most basic of blogs, and it works fine for more complicated blogs with hierarchies and taxonomies. There's also a good collection of themes you can directly use or use as the starting point.

adrianmsmith 2y ago
Re: Hugo Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer. The documentation is spread across the text/template and html/template Godoc and also Hugo's documentation of the DOM (e.g. attributes of a page object, which you'll need to display the page's title etc., if you're writing custom themes or altering existing ones). I didn't find the documentation of the DOM particularly good at the time (10 years ago now, may have improved), lots of examples but not much reference documentation if you want to do something other than what the example does. Be aware as well that there are no hierarchies in categories, e.g. in WordPress you can have "dev" and under that "java", "go" etc. Go just has flat categories. If you want to have a "dev" category displaying all your dev stuff, you have to tag each "java" post as "dev" in addition.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer I didn't find it difficult coming from Jinja, but it's not something trivial, I agree. However templating isn't something you need unless you go into more complicated topics - most themes cover the basics pretty well, and there are a lot of resources online to guide you.
yellowapple 2y ago
Hugo and other Jekyll-like SSGs are definitely on my radar, too. Hugo in particular seems nice in that the migration path looks pretty trivial. My big worry with such tools is that the templates tend to get real hairy real fast, and I think moving away from anything that resembles Jekyll is psychologically necessary to shake off that writers' block. Main thing drawing me toward Fossil is that I've already been transitioning my personal software projects onto it anyway, and Fossil's Markdown dialect happens to have some very nice features that I like. Main downside is that it's very much not designed with blogs or generic websites in mind, so while I was able to come up with a decent prototype (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/website https://fsl.yellowapple.us/website), there's still a bit of jank that'll take some more in-depth customization. Main thing drawing me toward Scroll is its flexibility; it's cool being able to do everything "in Scroll" instead of having to switch between content v. frontmatter v. config files v. themes v. plugins. Main downside is that it lacks maturity and documentation, so trying to figure out how to use it is a bit of an adventure in its own right.

by sofixa 2y ago

adrianmsmith 2y ago

Re: Hugo Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer. The documentation is spread across the text/template and html/template Godoc and also Hugo's documentation of the DOM (e.g. attributes of a page object, which you'll need to display the page's title etc., if you're writing custom themes or altering existing ones). I didn't find the documentation of the DOM particularly good at the time (10 years ago now, may have improved), lots of examples but not much reference documentation if you want to do something other than what the example does. Be aware as well that there are no hierarchies in categories, e.g. in WordPress you can have "dev" and under that "java", "go" etc. Go just has flat categories. If you want to have a "dev" category displaying all your dev stuff, you have to tag each "java" post as "dev" in addition.

sofixa 2y ago
> Be aware that the templating language is a bit difficult to learn if you're not already a Go programmer I didn't find it difficult coming from Jinja, but it's not something trivial, I agree. However templating isn't something you need unless you go into more complicated topics - most themes cover the basics pretty well, and there are a lot of resources online to guide you.

yellowapple 2y ago

Hugo and other Jekyll-like SSGs are definitely on my radar, too. Hugo in particular seems nice in that the migration path looks pretty trivial. My big worry with such tools is that the templates tend to get real hairy real fast, and I think moving away from anything that resembles Jekyll is psychologically necessary to shake off that writers' block. Main thing drawing me toward Fossil is that I've already been transitioning my personal software projects onto it anyway, and Fossil's Markdown dialect happens to have some very nice features that I like. Main downside is that it's very much not designed with blogs or generic websites in mind, so while I was able to come up with a decent prototype (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/website https://fsl.yellowapple.us/website), there's still a bit of jank that'll take some more in-depth customization. Main thing drawing me toward Scroll is its flexibility; it's cool being able to do everything "in Scroll" instead of having to switch between content v. frontmatter v. config files v. themes v. plugins. Main downside is that it lacks maturity and documentation, so trying to figure out how to use it is a bit of an adventure in its own right.