Always interesting to see what someone else came up with for their static site generator. If I had known about yours, I might have used it instead of writing mine: https://github.com/dgoffredo/dgoffredo.github.io
Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#32It would be nice if as part of the zero config effort, programs (esp. programs that aim to be easy-to-use Web-authoring tools) would focus even more on being as close to zero setup/zero installation as possible, too. To wit: This program is written in TypeScript, a browser-incompatible dialect of JS that is nonetheless regularly compiled to standard JS, e.g. to transform a given module into a form that can run in the…
netlify has something similar to what you describe - https://app.netlify.com/drop
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#33Static websites are great! I would love for them to be more popular. But a lot of people are locked out by the technical hurdle. "Just use and host on " does not work for your aunt, parent or SO.
I've tried and went into a different direction and created a desktop app [1] for creating a basic website. Yes it's electron and yes it currently only uploads to Vercel for hosting. But those are things my dad does not care about. I can send him a pre-configured "project" file, so he does not even have to enter any API keys.
EDIT: I've re-read this and this sounds like I'm ranting on your project. Not my intention, I love the bloat free sites md2blog generates. Keep it up!
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#34Perhaps out of scope for your use case, but what’s the status of SEO support? Using frontmatter to generate basic meta tags, twitter/open graph for pretty links, etc. Might be a useful FAQ entry.
md2blog automatically adds the following meta tags: description, keywords. The "keywords" tag includes both the post's category (derived from the parent directory name), as well as any keywords specified in YAML front matter. I don't use Twitter/Facebook, so I wasn't aware of Open Graph. That might be worth looking into. I'm familiar with the concept, but didn't realize there was a standard.
Horrible though it is, you need to include all the Opengraph tags for Facebook and Twitter, as a) thats how the preview cards are built when sharing over social media, and b) google uses them as good SEO markers.
Google have also said in the past, they don't use the 'keywords' meta tag for SEO anymore, due the abuse it gets.
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#35What do you think about Hugo [1]? It supports markdown.
Also thinking about hosting a static blog and don't know what ssg from md to choose.
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#36What do you think about Hugo [1]? It supports markdown. Also thinking about hosting a static blog and don't know what ssg from md to choose. [1] https://gohugo.io/
I like that Hugo ships in a single binary and has a security model around themes.
But I found Hugo’s template language to have the most unusual/unintuitive template language of any SSG I tried.
In the end, it comes down to personal preference:
Are you going to build your own templates or use a canned theme? If DIY, make sure you like the template language, otherwise make sure you can find a theme you like. This ruled out Hugo for me because I didn’t like the template language.
Do you think you’ll need to write code to perfect your workflow? If so, use one in a language you’re familiar with. Otherwise, just make sure you can tolerate the install/setup process. This ruled out Jekyll/Pelican for me.
If you’re using an SSG with a plug-in architecture, what’s the security model and are you comfortable with it? Security concerns around huge dependency trees pushed me away from Metalsmith.
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#37What do you think about Hugo [1]? It supports markdown. Also thinking about hosting a static blog and don't know what ssg from md to choose. [1] https://gohugo.io/
I like that Hugo ships in a single binary and has a security model around themes. But I found Hugo’s template language to have the most unusual/unintuitive template language of any SSG I tried. In the end, it comes down to personal preference: Are you going to build your own templates or use a canned theme? If DIY, make sure you like the template language, otherwise make sure you can find a theme you like. This ruled…
Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#38This looks great! I actually made a very similar tool called Markblog[1]. We did a lot the same way (even using Deno!), but we did themes a little differently. I used custom CSS-files, but your approach is even simpler. Not to detract from Md2blog, I just want to add it to the converstaion for anyone interested in these things :) Keep up! [1]: https://github.com/olaven/markblog
Thanks for sharing! Is there an example site built with Markblog? I didn’t see a link in the readme. It certainly sounds very similar! Edit: Found this link on the Markblog docs: https://olaven.org/ Edit again: I like that you appear to have an automated approach to deploying to GitHub Pages.
Thanks for checking it out!
Yeah, like you I made it for personal use :)
Thank you!
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple answer to "why not run this in a web page?" is that I built this tool based on my own needs and I never had any need to run a file system-based tool in my browser. On the other hand, if I wanted to ship something similar with a built-in editing experience , then I think running it in the browser would be the way to go. The problem I saw there (last time I checked) was that I couldn't write directories of f…
> The problem I saw there (last time I checked) was that I couldn't write directories of files to the file system You mean to an arbitrary path—why would this be necessary? The only write operation that most static site generators make use of is putting exactly one file tree somewhere after processing the input. The same thing is achieved by the browser's native Save File handling. If it were running in the browser,…
If your website is only text, you could have it as a single HTML file, so “Save As…” would be enough to export it. A working example: https://cadars.github.io/portable-php
Re: Show HN: Md2blog – A zero-config static site generator for dev blogs
#40Literally zero config: wordpress.com