org-mode-site-template VS lowtechguys

You can create a decente static website with templating, sitemaps, etc. with Emacs' built-in Org Mode. Here's my minimal setup:

https://github.com/hcarvalhoalves/org-mode-site-template

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

One less known use case for this is creating animated UI demos, which as a dev I find harder to do using video editing software.

I used it to create the simple demo on the rcmd frontpage: https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd

This is the code, where I'm just animating elements of an SVG I previously created with Sketch: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

I'm also doing the same thing for the Lunar frontpage: https://lunar.fyi/

But because Lunar's demo is a lot more resource intensive, I pre-rendered it into a video, and heavily optimized it for each screen size, in H.265, WEBM and H.264.