> On my crappy laptop a full site rebuild took 75 seconds. (Not compile, just to generate the site.) I only have 240 posts so I don’t think it should be that slow.
Wow, what on earth was Hakyll doing all that time?
Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#32I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…
I'm literally in the process of porting my blog to Zola right now (from Octopress).
One issue I hit is that taxonomies aren't available at the section-level (nor are they section-specific, in case you want to treat sections as sub-sites), this makes it seemingly impossible to have a section taxonomy view.
I might try to patch it, but it's tricky as it's like merging the taxonomy code with the page and section rendering.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#33Don't forget to throw your static site generator on the pile: https://jamstack.org/generators/
347 options and counting!
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#34I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…
I plan on writing a static site generator soon myself. And I briefly wondered the same thing and realized that I could very easily answer that question: ruthlessly build whatever I personally need and not what others need. I don't usually follow that line of thinking, but the static site generator space is so full of so many great tools that I don't think there's really anything for me to contribute to it. Instead, I…
> And I just keep getting bitten: someone else's tool gets so big and moves so rapidly, that by the time I get around to updating my site, []something about the new version of the tool has broken the way my web site works. And then I usually have to spend hours figuring out how to fix it[], which is hugely deflating because I had just worked up the energy to write a new post. My naive belief is that if I have my own tool that evolves at precisely the pace I want it to, I won't run into that specific problem. I'll run into other problems of course, but I'm thinking that I'll prefer those problems to the ones I currently face.
This is true, as a general principle, not just of static site generators, but of all software, and is one of the major Reasons Why We Can't Have Nice Things, and why automatic updates are evil and poisonous, and manual updates dangerous and often-avoided. See eg https://jacquesmattheij.com/why-johnny-wont-upgrade/.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#35I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…
I went with Hugo. It is written in Go.
If I were to make my own generator from scratch, I'd go with python. It's the language I work with the most. A lot of my blog content will be generated from python (figures etc) or will show python code. So having a site generator in the same language can help me add features by hacking on the generator code in a way that a single binary cannot.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#36I've been trying to make a cool static site generator numerous times. Well, yes, it actually is a quite fun thing to tinker with, but I've found myself struggling to decide on what do I want to see in the final app and what I do not; what features might be needed by other users and what features might be an overkill. So I ultimately went with Zola[1] and encourage you to try it too! Aaaand it is written in Rust, too.…
I went with Hugo. It is written in Go. If I were to make my own generator from scratch, I'd go with python. It's the language I work with the most. A lot of my blog content will be generated from python (figures etc) or will show python code. So having a site generator in the same language can help me add features by hacking on the generator code in a way that a single binary cannot.
On the other hand, having single binary is good because you don't have to install the runtime to tinker with the tool. Yet I do agree that tinkering options are very limited in comparison.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Ignoring the language itself for a moment) I absolutely love cargo. It’s so productive & easy to use. I have never had the pleasure of using such a painless cross platform build system. I’m neutral on Rust itself but Cargo is awesome.
Cargo takes a rather brute-force approach to the hard problems, but it generally just fucking works , which is a comically under-rated feature! On the one hand, it’s depressing that Cargo is forced to “go it’s own way” in order to achieve some sanity because it can’t can’t trust the platforms, but working is working and I can’t remember more than one or two times I’ve seen it shit the bed. It’s pragmatic, useable, di…
> On the one hand, it’s depressing that Cargo is forced to “go it’s own way” in order to achieve some sanity because it can’t can’t trust the platforms
I've used Rust and Cargo a bit but I don't have a lot of insight into it, what does Cargo actually need to implement itself instead of trusting the platform?
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#38I went from Jekyll to to Hugo to avoid being bothered with futzing with ruby gems.
Eventually I really appreciated the Golang approach to templating much more than Jinja/Liquid style templates, Go has kind of a composition-over-inheritance approach to templates.
If I ever have time to get proficient enough with Rust I'd love to port that Go templating approach to Rust. Maybe not so much the data interpolation syntax, but rather the approach to composing template partials. But ultimately I'm familiar enough with Jinja style, Zola would probably be a breeze to adopt as well.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I plan on writing a static site generator soon myself. And I briefly wondered the same thing and realized that I could very easily answer that question: ruthlessly build whatever I personally need and not what others need. I don't usually follow that line of thinking, but the static site generator space is so full of so many great tools that I don't think there's really anything for me to contribute to it. Instead, I…
> And I just keep getting bitten: someone else's tool gets so big and moves so rapidly, that by the time I get around to updating my site, [ ]something about the new version of the tool has broken the way my web site works. And then I usually have to spend hours figuring out how to fix it[ ], which is hugely deflating because I had just worked up the energy to write a new post. My naive belief is that if I have my ow…
> but of all software
I don't think so. There's lots of software that I've used and upgraded for decades and rarely if never run into any issues.
I don't think it's a general principle. I don't like generalizing to "all" unless I have a really good reason to do so. Instead, I stuck to my specific experience with static site generators.
Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit
#40Nice work and great write up!
I’m a huge fan of treating one’s blog as a “homelab” for exploring new (or old) software stacks for the web, so this idea resonates a lot.
One thing I’d like to try (has anyone tried this?): eschew the idea of a static site generator and go the “old school” route of dynamically generating each page on the fly, but take advantage of the modern CDN layer of the web (CloudFlare, etc.) to effectively cache and give you the speed equivalent of a static site. Yes this approach has more dependencies but I think simplifies the work done on the blog side since you can build it using whichever simple web framework appeals to you most (or none at all…this is a homelab after all).
My plan (don’t we all have this plan) is to try this out in Crystal when time allows…