Quest for a better blogging experience, part II

Published on Friday, March 9th, 2018


It's getting close to a year since I released my static site
generator Pile o' Text, and I think it's high time to
evaluate its strenghts and weaknesses:

Pros
 * No painpoints in operation; it's still very easy to work
   with.
 * The text is very readable, especially for the short
   bursts of text I wanted to encourage.
 * Multiple format outputs haven't been a problem.

Cons
 * It's a pain to deal with templates that are embedded in
   the script itself.
 * I use two different invocations in the typical workflow
   of adding an article: the pot script to add the article
   to index, and then a makefile to build and push the
   resulting artifacts onto the server.
 * It doesn't support incremental builds, everything is
   rebuilt from scratch.
 * The idea of having text -- no more, no less -- isn't a
   bad idea _per se_, but it kind of defeats the purpose of
   the web by layering this idea on top.
 * My primitive markdown-esque markup language is _very_
   limited, and I have no interest in improving it.
 * It's not very Unix-y at all in that it is a tiny
   monolith.

Quite a set of cons, innit? While I stand firm that the idea
of a minimal point-and-shoot solution for a pile of text
files is great, the integrated script that I hacked together
is terrible.

This is no surprise; it has always been terrible. But its
purpose has never been to be great, but to prove a point to
myself that static site generators doesn't need to be
horribly overengineered pieces of shit. It was a
sanity-check. And a reason to play in-depth with bash.

So what will I do now? I came across a post by Vladimir
Sedach where he explained his setup using make and a handful
of tools to manage his site, and I felt that this is the way
I want to evolve my own setup.

Stay tuned for a revamp! :)

<3 jzp