qubyte-codes VS Metalsmith

https://qubyte.codes

I blog about things which interest me (mostly JS and creative code related), but also take Japanese language notes as I learn. Also part of the 250KB club!

It's built with my own hand-rolled static site generator, and I'm pretty proud of it's capabilities now. I've got a bunch of indieweb features integrated into it. I have no sense of style though!

Source: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes

I use server rendered SVG with mathjax as part of my static site generator. To try to make it as accessible as possible I add a title element with an ID to each SVG and use an aria-labelledby attribute to connect the two [1] (a sample for the interested, scroll about half way down [2]). The title content is the unrendered LaTeX source.

I'm very interested in the notion of using HTML and CSS rendering though! Many thanks to the author for pointing out this functionality.

[1]: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/blob/main/lib/render....

Another static site builder author here. I found some of the same awkwardness in recreating __dirname, but after some massaging found it only remains when path.join is also used (which can't work with a file URL and can't be simply replaced with URL construction because the existing path is lost). I went the whole hog and completely replaced all CJS in my own code, and it's working well. Luckily I avoided issues with third party modules breaking.

PR with the changes: https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte-codes/pull/323

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/