Starts from Others

Having finally launched this modest blog, I sit back and reflect on how it came together. Mostly it was a series of small questions I had, searches for options and testing a few.

What will generate the site?

Some software that generates static html so I don't have to fuss with extra services for now (database, script, ..). Something popular enough that it's supported and changes with requests. Something open source so I can peak at what's going on and participate when needed. It should be modular so that I can introduce parts I like to it in a pluggable way.

Of course, none of these refinements to the question come at once. Rather, I look for options, give them a go, progress somewhere with them and ...the important bit... get stuck. I then reflect on why I'm stuck and refine my expectations to the question.

Having gone through this iteration a few times, I ended up going with Metalsmith, partly due to my preferences. In addition to being open source, active, it's stewards is a company that makes software that cares about optimizing and keeping things simple. It's also very modular and plugin friendly. That's nice when it comes to things like selecting a templating engine. I can go with my current preference, nunjucks.

It's also friendly to local automation scripts like gulp. Thanks to a gulp plugin called gulpsmith, I can have all my favorite automation creature comforts I'm familiar with available in a metalsmith pipeline.

There were plenty of other choices that were very close or that I just didn't research as well to go with them. In the wonderful world of static site generators, advantages will be missed.

Having said that, the best part of generating this site came in learning how others have stitched parts that I like together. For example, I really want nunjucks. How can I use it? One approache is to just search github for "nunjucks" & "metalsmith" and stumble upon projects already using both of these packages. Or how about a date formatting filter for nunjucks? Googling yielded packages like here's. How can i customize my gulp setup using gulpsmith. Again, searching both via google and github I stumbled upon this great example from the folks at Everyday Hero.

The same goes for using the software. For example, in templating how do i access the content of my markdown file? It's probably somewhere in the docs. But if it's not immediatly obvious. There's a good chance others might have missed it. Searching the issues of an active project usually yields the result. For example it's contents.

Use the source. Nunjucks has amazing filters. Get the general gist of how they work. Then look at the source code and be amazed at what they can do. You don't have to get what the function does. Just try it out. I recommend giving dump a go on any variable.

So that's just some of what went into bringing this humble post to life the way I wanted to do so. Let's see what it can help me get across.