I wanted to host a blog to occasionally write about topics that interest me, and
about experiences I've had. However, I don't have much need for static site
generators outside of this use case, so it seemed redundant to learn Hugo or
Jekyll, and I like to do things myself anyway. So I wrote a short Bash script
(blog) as my own little static site generator. It has everything I'd want from
it.
From ./blog -h:
Usage of this tiny static site generator:
-n / --new create a new post
-b / --build build the full site
To elaborate on this, I took inspiration from Hugo, and used comments at the start of the file to give basic information about the pages to build. For example:
<!--
page_title: Title of a Blog Post
page_description: This is the description of a blog post.
page_status: published
page_date: 2021/11/20
-->
The minimum a post needs to be published is a page_status: published, and a
page_date. A static page is definied by not having a page_date. For example,
you can create an "about" page by haing a post called about.markdown and;
<!--
page_title: About Page
page_description: This is the description of the about page.
page_status: published
-->
It creates a folder about with an index.html file in there with this
content.
You can use page_head: to let the script know you want that page to generate with a large heading style (this simply changes what tag the bulk of the page is in).
This setup doesn't really have anything linking it to a particular domain. I
really just want this to be very simple to use. It should be git clone'd into
your website directory, and from there, run the script with ./blog (chmod +x
if it's not executing).
If you have any questions please email me, hello@julianorchard.co.uk.