Trusty Interior

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New blog, who dis?

11 Jan 2023 · 📖 in 2 minutes A new project for a new year

I am starting the new year with a lot of time on my hands. This year I won't be jumping back to the deluge of new-year emails or trying to remember what projects I was working on. This year it'll start with a break. Throughout Jan I want to create a few things for myself and this blog is the perfect test bed.

(Re)Bloggy

Internally my blog is known as Bloggy and it's a fairly simple jekyll static site that is generated by Vercel when I push changes to GitHub. Overall I am happy with my setup and I really enjoy the freedom with not having to build anything myself - just write some markdown push my changes.

However, the static site generation part can't be that difficult to hand-roll right?

The steps I would need to do are:

  1. Parse liquid templates
  2. Parse post markdown
  3. Generate html for each post
  4. Generate html for the home page + pagination

So that's what I did. I re-wrote the jekyll site generator in Rust. It wasn't as straightforward as what I had imagined but I started out with the pretty solid building blocks of liquid and pulldown-cmark and glued it all together - all in all it's around 300 lines give or take but I expect that will balloon.

Rebloggy is by no means complete, there's plenty of features I need to implement e.g. incremental building / watching. I'm also currently using node-http-server to serve it locally too (something I could achieve with tiny-http).

I'll also be without the about page and likely the RSS feed, as currently I only build the posts and the home pages. I plan to add these later. One thing I deliberately left out was the SASS integration - I think we're probably at a point where I can do everything in vanilla CSS without the extra build steps.

Thank you, next.

Bloggy served me well and I got on well enough with Jekyll during the 7 years that I've used it (from the handful of posts per year you can see i'm also a prolific writer). The time has come to move on, and from today you'll be reading this on the new custom site generator that I built.

I have some ideas for new features I would like to build out now though:

First appeared on Trusty Interior, last update 10 Feb 2023