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Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

jonashietala.se

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Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#41

Post by burntsushi »

epage wrote: post #22
burntsushi wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

You should check out what fasterthanlime does for their blog. Theirs uses sqlite for storing all state and the write plugins into the Rust Liquid template implementation to directly query sqlite so they could do whatever they wanted without recompiling. It was pretty neat. I have been looking to break out parts of static-site-generators to make it easier to bring one up. So far I only have two primitive building bloc…

My needs are far simpler than that. I don't need state. I don't need dynamic content. I don't need ads. I don't need tracking. I don't need search. I just need a way to publish content and maybe an RSS feed. It doesn't even need to serve files. Everything is static. (I'm not saying fasterthanlime has all those things. Just saying what I don't need.)

I can't even imagine I need a template system beyond something I can write in a few dozen lines with some regexes.

I did the SQLite thing more than a decade ago. I ain't going back to it unless I have a really really good reason for it.

I really just need a purely static web site where I can write Markdown posts. There's some other stuff I want in terms of producing the static content, but in terms of web site functionality itself, it should just be HTML, CSS and some images.

I also don't mind re-compiling. For my needs, "compiling" my web site is likely to take less than 1 second.

Definitely don't need plugins. :)

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#42

Post by Macha »

alphachloride wrote: post #35
impoppy wrote: post #7

I'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.

I migrated from Pelican (Python) to Zola (Rust) because of the ease of replication of the environment. After a few years it was a pain to recreate my pelican environment and even the tools I'd used to try make that situation easier (pipenv) were undergoing their own bitrot.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#43

Post by Macha »

mynameisash wrote: post #11

> Several external dependencies. > It’s annoying to install all these and to keep them up-to-date, it would be great to just have a single thing to worry about. I feel the author's pain. There's a Python2 project for ebook management that I used pretty extensively years ago, but it depended on a number of external dependencies, both as compiled shared objects and other Python libraries. It felt extremely fragile and…

I also have a personal Rust ebook manager because of frustrations with calibre :)

Though Calibre has at least made it to Python 3 these days.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#44

Post by ducharmdev »

alphachloride wrote: post #35
impoppy wrote: post #7

I'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.

I went with Hugo too. I used Gatsby in the past, but it was slower and it felt a bit odd using GraphQL in the way it does. Maybe that'd make more sense if I was using an API to deliver content, but for simple markdown pages, it seemed unnecessary.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#45

Post by nindalf »

benreesman wrote: post #25
taftster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment helped me want to click through and read the post. I'm very tired of all the recent Rust fanboy posts, but level-headed and earnest comparisons against real implementations make for much better understanding of a new concept or language. Here are some select quotes from the article: > Please note that this is not to say that Rust this [sic] much faster than Haskell, instead see it as a comparison of two…

The author is clearly an experienced and mature hacker who knows many languages well. It’s pretty difficult to maintain the shrill “X is better than everything” tone you’re referring to with a diverse portfolio of marketable skills. I don’t know how Rust, which is quite a cool language, attracted this sizable bloc of aggressively intermediate jihadis, but it’s really worrying because Rust is in fact innovative and im…

You’re really going to call people jihadis for talking about the technical strengths of a programming language?

And then you’re going to act like you’re the self appointed arbiter of discourse on HN, saying that this kind of article is ok but that kind isn’t? Maybe a person who calls those they disagree with jihadis isn’t qualified to police what others say.

Let’s talk about the way you talk. Here’s you from 5 days ago accusing a good tool of being a “dumpster fire” and saying “it crashes process IDs more often than Justin Bieber crashes Maseratis”. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32581005). But it gets worse, because later you start crying about being downvoted.

At this point it looks like a speed run of how many HN rules you can break. And then you follow that up with tone policing others.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#46

Post by rumblings »

burntsushi wrote: post #14
impoppy wrote: post #7

I'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…

This. All the big static generators in the market are kinda of generic enough that they demand upfront investment from you. Whether its Jekyll, Hugo or any big shot you have to fit a lot of things according to them. My personal website is built by Jekyll, but I finding a lot harder to make changes because I am not comfortable with a Ruby tooling( Once, I had to debug an obscure Ruby related bug in M1 Mac). I am comfortable with Python though( I have considerable proficiency and good documentation) which then I will use it for my own static generator.

I guess writing your own non-generic own-static generator should be relatively easy and worth the effort as you wouldn't have to read some obscure documentation (like Jekyll).

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#47

Post by mxuribe »

hamaluik wrote: post #4

I did the same thing a couple years ago [0]. It's not the most elegant and my blog is miniscule, but it was a fun project and also born out of frustration with the existing site generators. I structured it as the source sitting next to the site contents, so from a fresh computer (with Rust installed), it's as straightforward as `cargo build`. I think the best thing about this approach (writing your own generator) is…

As enjoyable as this post was, i recalled my history with static site generators as follows: hand-code html pages --> hand-code html but w/ server-side includes (yes, back in the apache days) --> use php w/own custom templates and mysql db --> move to wordpress --> love the intent of wordpress, but regret the needed maintenance, so move back to custom php and custom templates --> move manage content via Lektor (python SSG) --> learn that i don't need a UI, and am content crafting my content in markdown --> start using pelican (python SSG) --> get bored, so move to Hugo as new SSG flavor of the month --> get annoyed with templating language --> move back to pelican --> realized i spent too much time bouncing around, just did away with any SSG tool set, and hand craft html pages whenever i want to publish something...and now only craft journal entries for my own private diary (with an occasional post on the fediverse). :-)

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#48

Post by pdimitar »

burntsushi wrote: post #41
epage wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out what fasterthanlime does for their blog. Theirs uses sqlite for storing all state and the write plugins into the Rust Liquid template implementation to directly query sqlite so they could do whatever they wanted without recompiling. It was pretty neat. I have been looking to break out parts of static-site-generators to make it easier to bring one up. So far I only have two primitive building bloc…

My needs are far simpler than that. I don't need state. I don't need dynamic content. I don't need ads. I don't need tracking. I don't need search. I just need a way to publish content and maybe an RSS feed. It doesn't even need to serve files. Everything is static. (I'm not saying fasterthanlime has all those things. Just saying what I don't need.) I can't even imagine I need a template system beyond something I can…

I plan on trying https://luapress.org/ one of the next weeks. Looks good at a first glance -- give it a quick check if you get a free hour, would be interested what you think of it.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#49

Post by thrwawy74 »

I really liked the reactive pattern, so one of the best static site generators I found was docpad. It used (backbone?) collections, so you could subscribe to changes on things like "new files under this path" and then rerender the part of the page that needed to change. I haven't seen this done in others. Then docpad was rewritten in ES6, and I lost all love for it. Things were so expressively concise in Coffeescript.

Re: Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit

#50

Post by annowiki »

This is mindblowing synchronicity. I thought this article was one I had read this weekend for a second but checked the post date and saw it wasn't available yesterday.

I'm working on trying to write a static site generator for my own personal site/blog in C++, been tinkering for a couple months. It started as a passion project in tribute to my dog that passed. GatsbyJS wasn't working (again) which is what my current site is built with, so I just said screw it, I'll write my own. Chose C to begin with and quickly gave up. Decided to switch to C++ because its what I'm supposed to be learning for work.

I named it bluesky, after my dog that passed, Sky Blue. https://github.com/mas-4/bluesky

Templating is a lot harder than I had initially thought. I wanted the templating system to be as bare bones as possible, similar to another static site generator I rather like, sergey[0]. Most of these articles I found ([1], [2]) about writing your own SSG don't go into templating much, they just use an off the shelf library. Inja[3] is available for C++ but, like I said, I want something really bare bones, like if you were designing html now, you'd obviously include html-includes and html-templates. I finally got it working for includes and templates, now I have to add the markdown support, and then I plan on migrating my personal site to using it.

[0]: https://sergey.cool/ [1]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/09/stack-custom-made-s... [2]: https://blog.hamaluik.ca/posts/build-your-own-static-site-ge... [3]: https://github.com/pantor/inja

edit: a link

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