51–60 of 136 posts
I setup a cronjob to fetch weather data and run the SSG to parse the XML and render a weather "website" on my VPS.
But for the blogs I've had/have, I just use a pre-existing one (zola). There are hundreds of SSGs out there, why bother building yet another one if one already exists for transforming your preferred base doc (markdown, asciidoc, morse code, etc)
It's a fun project to try out new tech, but you have to acknowledge that you're doing it for fun rather than any sort of necessary reason. It's like when you build a game engine and never get around to doing the hard part: building the game. It's a procrastination time hole that mostly just distracts us from the harder, less concrete, less fun thing we supposedly set out to do in the first place. It keeps us from shi…
This project isn't about blogging, you need to look at it from a side project pov.
I think this is a common misconception, that these people want to write a blog post but are failing or procrastinating when they don't have to. When in reality, these people are developers and makers who look at their personal website from tech community's "little corner on the internet" pov.
They feel frustrated with the solution and feel they can develop better-tailored one for themselves. Putting out blog posts isn't a priority or a concern for most of these developers. They're passionate about their tools. They make tons of side projects. They're not wasting time. They don't necessarily have a more important post to write about.
If you're looking at it from a blogger/writer's perspective, sure that's wasteful, but, again, that's not what this is about.
It's a fun project to try out new tech, but you have to acknowledge that you're doing it for fun rather than any sort of necessary reason. It's like when you build a game engine and never get around to doing the hard part: building the game. It's a procrastination time hole that mostly just distracts us from the harder, less concrete, less fun thing we supposedly set out to do in the first place. It keeps us from shi…
Yep. You also see this often in small companies/statups that would write their own ticket systems and internal administrative intranets before they even had a product.
There's no requirement for websites to be generated either statically or dynamically. The best websites are just files in folders.
I'm not sure I'd advocate for writing a static site generator, although I'm certainly guilty of writing a few myself. Instead I always encourage people who are trying to start blogging to do the writing first. Figure out a workflow that works for you - what time of day you prefer writing, what editor, do diagrams naturally come up in your thought stream, etc. It's way easier to get this workflow dialed in when you're…
But if you write a static site generator, you can blog about it. And that can be the first and the last post of your blog. If you don't write one, the chance is good, your blog would stay empty.
In all seriousness does everyone and their mom write a static site generator? I did because its fun and easy. Off the shelf ones can be cumbersome and not work quite how I want them to.
Call me crazy, but for my blog I just write HTML and RSS manually in a text editor.
It's a fun project to try out new tech, but you have to acknowledge that you're doing it for fun rather than any sort of necessary reason. It's like when you build a game engine and never get around to doing the hard part: building the game. It's a procrastination time hole that mostly just distracts us from the harder, less concrete, less fun thing we supposedly set out to do in the first place. It keeps us from shi…
I'm not sure I'd advocate for writing a static site generator, although I'm certainly guilty of writing a few myself. Instead I always encourage people who are trying to start blogging to do the writing first. Figure out a workflow that works for you - what time of day you prefer writing, what editor, do diagrams naturally come up in your thought stream, etc. It's way easier to get this workflow dialed in when you're…
I certainly learned to keep the featureset of such a program to a minimum in order to have a chance to "complete" and publish it.
Btw. the article lists five points that really come close to how such a generator may work. I think mine only leaves out the CSS compilation stuff and offloads the Markdown processing to pandoc...