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Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

brandur.org

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Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#81

Post by kemayo »

magicalhippo wrote: post #71

Some 15 years ago or so I made a PHP script that took a Word document, saved in XML format, and turned into a static HTML page as part of my blog. It would rely on the paragraph style, turning "Header 1" into etc, as well as extract images and such. Lately I've been seriously thinking of reimplementing that, as I just can't seem to find a decent static site generator. They all seem to require a bunch of plugins and c…

Depending on what you think of as "the bare minimum", I'd think Jekyll or Hugo would work.

E.g. the Hugo quick start guide is pretty much just "install Hugo, pick a theme, add your content" and gets you a barebones sequence-of-posts blog: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#82

Post by tristor »

magicalhippo wrote: post #71

Some 15 years ago or so I made a PHP script that took a Word document, saved in XML format, and turned into a static HTML page as part of my blog. It would rely on the paragraph style, turning "Header 1" into etc, as well as extract images and such. Lately I've been seriously thinking of reimplementing that, as I just can't seem to find a decent static site generator. They all seem to require a bunch of plugins and c…

> I just can't seem to find a decent static site generator.

Maybe you and I have very different ideas of what is required to write a blog, but it sounds like you should be able to use Hugo + the theme of your choice and just go with it. It's /very/ easy, and posts are all written in Markdown.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#83

Post by tristor »

ducktective wrote: post #30

Anyone have any experience with Hugo? It started out as a fast single binary static site generator but it seems it is now dependent on Go being installed on the host...

It's not dependent on Go being installed on the host... I'm not sure why you think this is the case. Like most Go applications, it's compiled into a single static binary.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#85

Post by mfkp »

dfinr wrote: post #55

MkDocs plus Material theme on GitHub pages is pretty sweet. Automatic dark mode, useful plugins. I migrated from WordPress, no looking back.

Do you have an example link of a site running mkdocs with material theme?

Edit: I'm guessing it's this? https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/getting-started/

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#86

Post by m463 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #37
eevilspock wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"free/opensource" -> !M$

Setting aside how weary I am of "M$" (it's just about tied with using "sheep" to describe Apple users), what on God's green earth does Microsoft have to do with the OP's point? GitHub itself is not and was never open source. It's not like Microsoft bought it and closed off the source. Do you think using Microsoft tools demonically injects anti-FSF sentiment into your work? ("I started using VS Code, and now whenever…

github seems to have a nicer flavor markdown. Maybe it's just because github is code oriented.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#87

Post by freedomben »

spurgu wrote: post #72
freedomben wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I run a few WordPress sites and the amount of maintenance with them is crazy. The plugin model makes maintenance brutal too since it's all independent devs with different release cycles, testing practices, etc.

Following the philosophy of simple hosting + MD outlined in the OP then the WP equivalent would be something like a simple (official twenty*, or your own custom) WP theme with zero (or minimal amount of) plugins. Enable auto-updates on WP and you're done. The more plugins you use, the faster entropy kicks in without maintenance. With WP in general though I definitely agree.

Agreed, if you stick with the twenty* themes and keep it simple, you can get pretty far with very little maintenance.

For simple sites, especially where we don't do comments, I've started using Simply Static though to just generate pre-rendered pages. All the benefits of static site builder with all the conveniences of a CMS.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#88

Post by emj »

vitorfs wrote: post #56
Lammy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it slow to regenerate a single post even with Jekyll’s ‘—incremental’ mode?

yes because of a bad design decision I made to create a custom "related posts", which is a code that searches all my markdowns to pick the best pages and add to the current page. so even with `--incremental` it take quite some time to regenerate

20 years ago that was my first useful custom CGI script, it took the metadata of the current page and ran a grep for pages with similar tags. Running that was really fast and flexible until I published it and got my first ten simultaneous visitors.

Then I learned about how hard it is to use a cache.

Re: Blog with Markdown and Git, and degrade gracefully through time

#89

Post by yhoiseth »

grandvoye wrote: post #27

IMO the biggest barrier to blogging (and the cause of most blogs dying) is inconvenience, and minimizing that if the biggest advantage of Markdown + Git. If there's any inconvenience at all, it naturally drags on the process of writing, and writing takes enough time and focus that if there's any friction it's too easy to push things off to the next day. My co-author and I use Markdown and Git as the author suggests,…

Love your blog!
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