Hyde VS Metalsmith

A few of them.

1. https://github.com/hamon-in/invoice/ was a command line invoicing program that I wrote and used for 2 years before moving to something SasS based.

2. https://github.com/nibrahim/Calligraphic-Rulings is a command line (and later web based - http://calligraffiti.in/rulings) tool I wrote and use regularly while to practise calligraphy

3. https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde And emacs mode to manage Jekyll/Octopress blogs which I use for my personal site

A bunch of smaller scripts for daily work (e.g. mini pomodoro timer, Emacs scripts to manage client conversations etc.)

http://nibrahim.net.in

I used to run this on wordpress when it was first released. Built a few terrible looking themes for it too. This was a redesign from that time. It was doing using the YUI toolkit. Phones were not a thing then so I didn't consider that. Many of the ideas were taken from snippets of CSS Zen Garden. It's generated using Jekyll and has disqus for comments. I wrote an emacs mode https://github.com/nibrahim/Hyde to manage the blog. Much of the content is outdated. I don't actively blog anymore.

This is hosted on a shared hosting service called hcoop which I got onto in 2001 or so and have been on ever since. The domains were registered on an Indian registrar (net4) which went under and I migrated them to namecheap a month or two ago.

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/