Jekyll, self hosting a hacked together templating server, or Hugo… the possibilities are endless.
Motivation
I’ve been wanting to switch to something other than my own templating system for a while now. However, I had a couple reasons for keeping the templating system:
- “Absolute control” over everything
- I won’t have to go digging for loopholes to get certain features I want working
- Learning
- Software independence
- A bit ironic considering the previous project had way too many npm dependencies anyway
Things eventually got messy. I mean… I had code that looked like this :joy: :
const reqPaths: {[p: string]: string} = {
"/": "about.html",
"/url": "url.html",
"/softsim": "softsim.html",
"/iou": "iou.html",
"/truthy": "truthy.html",
"/blog": "blog.html"
};
Object.keys(reqPaths).forEach(reqPath => {
app.get(reqPath, (req: Request, res: Response, next: NextFunction) => {
// it's not actually a blog, but I conveniently wrote this to treat this with arbitrary keys
readBlog(path.join(process.cwd(), `public/views/pages/${reqPaths[reqPath]}`)).then((blog: Blog) => {
blog.url = "https://andw.me"+req.url;
res.render("index", {
blog: blog
});
}).catch((err: Error) => {
console.log(err);
// 404 them lol
next();
});
});
});
Futhermore, I noticed that there was egress limit on Google Cloud Platform’s free tier, and although I haven’t crossed the limit yet (and that CloudFlare does an amazing job with regionalized caching), I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting charged for serving too much data.
The solution was to switch to a static site that is hosted generously by a reliable provider: Github Pages.
A website from scratch?
Pfft… no way!
The main reason I used a markdown-to-html generator in the first place was to avoid writing HTML. I am by no means a proper frontend designer, so markdown is a solid first choice to write blogs.
I didn’t want to deal with any backend code or want to go through the trouble of hosting for anything dynamic.
I started with Jekyll, a static site generator. Jekyll comes to mind when most people think of static web generators built around markdown.
Jekyll
The reason why I didn’t stick with Jekyll is because I didn’t like the look of any of the themes.
I found an “awesome list” of Jekyll themes but even then, there still wasn’t one that stood out. Minimal Mistakes is a good theme, but I couldn’t get it to work.
The Jekyll themes that looked “good” had to be bought from the jekyllthemes site.
I will definitely be using Jekyll for my other projects though.
Hugo
I looked over a couple of other people’s blogs to see what Jekyll themes they were using. I ran into a Jekyll alternative instead: Hugo. Hugo came with many more themes that I could use.
I picked Dream by gleny0ung to use because I liked the cell-like blog previews on the home page.
Moving forward
My old website can still be accessed at old.andw.me. (update from 2024: link now broken)
I still need to figure out and where I’m going to place my old tools like truthy and the URL shortener. (update from 2024: link now broken)
markdown