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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

#101

Post by magicalhippo »

kemayo wrote: post #81
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/

The issue with the quick start is that it's a bit too bare bones by the look of it, and the documentation for anything more complicated gets very confusing by someone new to it.

I'll give it a whirl tho, thanks!

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

#102

Post by byhemechi »

mfkp wrote: post #85
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/

yeah, that'd be the the one. Not too sure if mkdocs material is the best theme to go with for a blog, though.

Here's a site using it: https://docs.libretro.com/

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

#103

Post by lostapathy »

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

Not really fair to blame the performance on Jekyll, then. Presumably you could build yourself to the same issue with any other generator.

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

#104

Post by misterbrian »

I agree with Markdown + Git. I recently migrated my personal tech blog from Jekyll to Nuxt with static generation and the @nuxt/content API. I had some difficulties preserving the /YYYY/MM/DD/slug.html routes that I had used for my markdown files. It is very nice to be able to mix markdown and Vue components, but this adds additional work for cross-posting and future site migrations.

For example, I recently wrote an article about YC's Work at a Startup that contains some interactive visualizations embedded in the markdown file I used to draft the content as Vue components. If I want to cross post, I'll probably need to maintain another version of the markdown that either contains static images of the interactive elements and/or links back to my site (on GitHub pages).

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

#105

Post by lhorie »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #68
lhorie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One explanation comes from just looking from the content creator's point of view: they kinda don't care what previous iterations of the work really look like (draft-final-v5-oct27-FINAL.doc anyone?) The things a content creator might be more interested in aren't really core git strengths: SEO, publishing schedules, editorial back-and-forth, social media, etc.

"SEO, publishing schedules, editorial back-and-forth, social media" Hmm, not really core PostgreSQL strengths either. What am I missing?

Wordpress isn't popular because of its choice of database or any specific technology, it's popular because it's feature set is user-centric.

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

#106

Post by WorldMaker »

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,…

On the inconvenience front, I think that also makes it clear why so much stuff that would have been blogs, say prior to 2013 to pick a pseudo-random date [1], is that the convenience of various walled gardens got very convenient. It's really easy to post an update to the walled garden social media site of your preference (Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, whatever), and with network effects really conveniently easy to have some sense of readership (even if it just Likes or Faves or whatever).

There are some blogs that I realize will never "come back" so long as "everyone is on Twitter these days". Because Twitter is still so much more convenient that blogs (even ones in Markdown + Git).

[1] Okay, not actually random, it was the Google Reader shutdown year. Google Reader provided a lot of convenience to RSS, including social media-like network effects, that almost brought blogs mainstream.

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

#108

Post by luord »

I use GitHub/GitLab pages and build my site using Pelican, so I'm pretty much already there.

Coincidentally, just two days ago I too went through my RSS subscriptions and, fortunately, most of them were still online, but sadly quite a few hadn't been updated in years, so it's likely that this will happen to them. Safe to say, I agree wholeheartedly with the author.

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

#109

Post by misterbrian »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #52

There is a problem in the CMS industry. Everyone wants to build a headless CMS to power Jamstack sites—only the content itself lives in databases and the CMS is usually a proprietary SaaS. Doesn't leverage Git for content in any way. This is deeply problematic. We should have dozens, if not hundreds of contenders for "the next WordPress" that leverage Git as a foundational aspect of content management. Instead we hav…

I agree, I had this debate recently for what to use on a static site and we went with a Git-based CMS (https://content.nuxtjs.org/) over Strapi. I use nuxt/content for my personal site as well and really enjoy working with it.

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

#110

Post by staysaasy »

yhoiseth wrote: post #89
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!

Thanks for reading! Really appreciate it. It's been quite a journey and I honestly credit the tech stack with making it so easy to write.
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