I just released v0.1.0 of hinoki, my static site generator :)
The README.md
should explain usage, and you can also see how I ported my blog to it here.
This project started because I’m not entirely happy with Zola, which does not support customizing page paths much (e.g. /year/month/day/title/index.html
style paths) and made some other design decisions that I wanted to explore alternatives to.
You can download the binary from GitHub releases, or cargo install
it from git.
Any feedback is appreciated, here or in the GitHub issues!
I’ll try to fit in sampling it at some point in the near future as a candidate for building on.
I just decided to finally double down and do the work to switch away from WordPress to GitHub Pages and:
pulldown-cmark
-based CLI that I wrote a couple of years ago to render single documents and it’d be nice to retrofit it (or at least its features) onto something Rust-based for my blog. (Hell, just a couple of days ago, after implementing support for shortcodes, I got carried away implementing a complete set of shortcodes for rendering depictions of gamepad buttons like:btn-l-snes:
within passages of text. Bit of a shame, though, that I’d have to either patchpulldown-cmark
or maintain the smart punctuation and strikethrough extensions externally, if I want to hook in shortcodes early enough in the pipeline to be able to implement Compose key-inspired ones like:'e:
/:e':
→ é or:~n:
/:n~:
→ ñ without breaking things.)```svgbob
fenced code blocks which produce rendered diagrams, `` tags which provide currency-conversion estimation tooltips with the exchange rate defined in a central location, etc.) or have plans for (eg. plotters-generated charts with some kind contributed extension equivalent to matplotlib’s xkcd mode because it’s important, Wikipedia-style infobox sidebars, etc.), I want to experiment with a WebAssembly-based plugin API so I’m not throwing the kitchen sink in.Hey, only saw this now! Have you investigated some of the options already now?
Re. Jekyll, I have the same experience which is what got me to try Zola. I find it rather nice to use at least when you’re okay with its limitations – which hasn’t always been the case… missing flexibility for output paths has been an annoyance. What really led me to make my own Rust SSG instead of forking Zola is that I found Zola to be quite hard to hack on, and Tera (its templating lang) to be a little buggy / much less elegant than minijinja API-wise.
Re. link checking, have you seen lychee? When I found out about it, the priority of building my own link checker in my SSG (that was only an idea at that point, I think) basically dropped to zero :D
A bunch of other things came up, forcing me to put the project on the back burner.
(eg. Most recently (about a week ago), I had my 6-month-old boot drive go bad and it took me several days to rush-order a new NVMe drive, learn ZFSBootMenu, restore my backups, and redesign my backup strategy so that, when the original comes back from RMA, if the ZFS mirroring and snapshotting and the trick to mirror the EFI system partition isn’t enough to ensure high availability, a full, bootable backup of the NVMe pool’s contents can be restored in 2 hours or less with the sequential read performance of my first tier of backup being the bottleneck.)
Hmm. We’ll see if I wind up using it. Avoiding deadlinks has been non-negotiable to the point where replicating my WordPress blog on a local httpd, spidering it, and logging the URLs I need to preserve has been one of the big hold-ups.
Hmm. Potentially a reason I’ll wind up making my own, given that I’ve written SSGs in Python before (eg. https://vffa.ficfan.org/ is on a homebrew Python SSG) and I’ve already got a single-page
pulldown-cmark
frontend I’ve gone way overboard on the features for and a basic task-specific Rust SSG for my mother’s art website that I can merge with it and generalize.EDIT: Here’s a screenshot of what I mean by saying I’ve gone way overboard.
Hmm. Noted. I think i’m using Tera for my mother’s SSG.
You accidentally re-used the link to the Zola issue tracker there. I have not yet checked out lychee and I’m getting a docs.rs error when clicking the examples link, so all I can say is that it’ll depend on how amenable it is to checking a site rooted in a
file://
URL so I don’t need the overhead and complexity of spinning up an HTTP server to check for broken links.Wow! Impressive :)
Oops, fixed.
Wouldn’t you want your SSG to include a dev-server anyways? Zola has
zola serve
which even does incremental rebuilds, but something less sophisticated should be easy to add to your own (only took me a weekend to add to hinoki including rebuilds, though mostly starting the build from scratch on changes).I don’t want the overhead of looping through an HTTP client and server implementation in places it doesn’t need to. I design my tooling based on a test target roughly comparable to the Raspberry Pi 4, performance-wise.
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Thanks. Being the biggest name, Zola is definitely on my list of things to investigate.