Makesite

I’ve been using pelican to generate my site so far. However I’ve never been quite happy with the options I was given. Actually most static site generators I’ve tried were too limiting, despite trying to stay very minimal. Either the templates were confusing, inserting static content at a specific path was unwieldy or some other nusciance.

Thus after reading about it time and time again I’ve been wanting to write my own static site generator. It gives you full control and makes for a nice weekend project. But alas, I’m lazy and never got around to it.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon makesite while browsing Hacker News. It’s a minimal static site generator written in python. However, it is built to incentivize you to modify it. All of the code in contained within one ~200 LoC file. Thus it’s easy to understand exactly what’s happening and subsquently modify it to your liking.

I did just that and took the opportunity to redesign and move the blog to Uberspace too. It is now even slimmer, “only” clocking in at ~800K for everything, most of which are images. Loading the frontpage now uses ~5K as opposed to ~16K before. And no external resources like scripts or fonts are being used anymore.

With this new control I can also think about turning the blog more into a digital garden by having makesite compile my personal notes into their own section. Plus I really enjoy the garden analogy and you might too!

Edit 2023-09-29: Adding this comment while moving the blog to hugo again…