discount VS Metalsmith

I have a blog[0], I write stuff. I don't have a job yet but I blog about my personal life and on technical problems, feelings, and stuff.

I also have a website with other things here and there [5].

The blog itself is literally a git repository, browsable here[1]. Whenever I push, it runs a git hook that executes build commands. The blog is composed of markdown files.

All the blog can be rebuilt by following the instructions and is meant to be as platform-agnostic as possible, meaning you could host it under any webserver under any path, links are relative, etc.

The blog system I use is blogit [2]; originally created by Pedantic software but has been heavily modified by yours truly[4]. Under the hood it's literally a makefile, unix `sed,grep,etc` to make tagging and other static stuff. It uses the markdown parser discount[3] to parse markdown into html. It is fully static and you can deploy it and just put a simple python http server on it. I use lighttpd, because I have some services set up.

[0] https://blog.thetrevor.tech/

[1] https://git-trevcan.duckdns.org/trevcan.github.io.git/

[2] https://pedantic.software/git/blogit

[3] https://github.com/Orc/discount

[4] I have this repo: https://git.trevcan.duckdns.org/blogit.git/ but it's not updated, check out the blog repo, the blogit makefile is there.

[5] https://thetrevor.tech/

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG

I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image.

const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' }) .source('./src') .destination('./build') // .clean(true) .use( collections({ projects: 'pages/*.md', reverse: true, refer: true }) ) .use(markdown()) .use(permalinks()) .use( layouts({ engineOptions: { helpers: { formattedDate: function (date) { return new Date(date).toLocaleDateString() } } } }) ) .build(function (err, files) { if (err) throw err })

I also started to move to hugo, but they didn't merge the pr [2] which would have helped in the transition. :(

The look is still similar to what it was in the beginning, in terms of colors at least.

[1] https://github.com/metalsmith/metalsmith

Metalsmith

A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/

It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself.

For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading.

But then I was able to easily add in my own code to handle relative links, generate Graphviz diagrams, and format dates.

One other recommendation: I hated almost every template language I ran across (Hugo's, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS), but I'm thrilled with the simplicity of Handlebars (https://handlebarsjs.com/), although it is a bit limiting and the "block helper with parameters" syntax is strange (perhaps an indicator that I'm trying to do too much in the templating language!).

I believe Metalsmith [1] is trying that approach

[1] https://metalsmith.io/