
Saait: a boring HTML page generator - weeber
https://codemadness.org/saait.html
======
sephoric
I was considering using bash, some command line markdown transformer, and a
makefile to transform my blog posts from markdown into HTML by wrapping them
in an HTML template that just have the strings $TITLE, $BODY, and $DATE
substituted. I think that would be a fun way to do this with zero C code. One
of the hard parts was figuring out how to avoid too many nested data
structures, like embedded title in the markdown files via front matter. But I
figured out that if all you have is a title and it's a one-line string, you
can just use the `head` and `tail` command line utils to extract either the
title string or the markdown body depending on which operation you're in the
middle of, and you can still just use bash (except for the markdown
converter). I plan to use this on my blog[1], and maybe also to generate a
blog index.

[1] [https://sephware.com/blog/](https://sephware.com/blog/)

~~~
flukus
Links broken.

> But I figured out that if all you have is a title and it's a one-line
> string, you can just use the `head` and `tail` command line utils to extract
> either the title string or the markdown body depending on which operation
> you're in the middle of, and you can still just use bash

I took a similar approach with mine ([http://flukus.github.io/building-a-blog-
engine.html](http://flukus.github.io/building-a-blog-engine.html)) but it
get's messy pretty quickly. In a future iteration I'm planning on using M4
templates instead, M4 is actually pretty nice outside of autoconf.

~~~
johnnycarcin
You might want to check this out:
[https://github.com/alicemaz/website](https://github.com/alicemaz/website)

Pretty nifty.

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nicoburns
Despite having fewer features, this looks considerably less easy to use (and
certainly less well documented!) than Hugo
([https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)). Which, being written in Go is
probably much _easier_ than this to compile across different platforms (unless
you're using a really obscure platform). I can't see much reason to use this.

~~~
Groxx
Coming from zero Jekyll experience: I've spent about a dozen hours with Hugo,
and I still have an incredible number of problems with it.

When it works it's quite nice, and the live-reloading is cool. I can totally
understand why people like it.

But it falls apart all the time on small mistakes, doesn't tell you when it
does so, and doesn't tell you why it's failing to find anything at all simply
because you entered a non-existent config value in the borderline-undocumented
themes that refer to old config setups or just have copied Jekyll
instructions. I've spent about half the time changing config or text and
wondering why it wasn't updating, only to discover that the reloading was
broken or that I had to delete some earlier-built stuff that it didn't detect
needed changing. It has driven me away at least twice, and I still don't know
how to find out what went wrong (much less what I need to do to fix it) when I
break it.

I've actually been seriously considering switching to Jekyll just to see if
it'd be more helpful for learning.

\---

This, on the other hand, has a couple interpolation markers and everything
else would be defined up-front. I can figure that out in a few minutes and
probably use it correctly forever after.

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jagger27
The best static site generator I've used is Hugo. Still haven't been tempted
to fork it or modify any of the generating code. It has just enough helper
functions to be useful. The theme system is really lovely too, with a ton of
simple templates to work from. I don't use the built in web server, but it's
great for local testing.

I highly recommend it for any text heavy sites.

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equalunique
Cool!

OpenBSD enthusiast Roman Zolotarev has ssg4, a static site generator that's a
simple shell script.

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jshawl
If you really want boring you should save users the trouble of compiling c
code.

