Apologies for the delay between posts — it’s not for lack of topics or interest, just a matter of time and energy. I’ve been spending time trying out different static site generators for a potential move off WordPress (at least for some projects), and that’s been eating into what spoons I have spare for writing. At this point I’ve been fiddling mostly with 11ty and Astro, and while I’m not 100% happy with either of them, it’s been a worthwhile learning experience regardless. I may also end up taking a stab at Hugo, but we’ll see. The main issues I have mostly boil down to opinion — every framework is opinionated to one degree or another regarding how to structure things, how to format things, and so on, and I don’t agree with those opinions all the time. Then it becomes a matter of how hard it is to override those defaults to work more how I want to work.
For instance, a lot of these frameworks/generators feel that any images you include should be optimized, and when optimizing, the file paths should become arbitrary hashes. I don’t mind the optimizing part, but I fuckin’ hate when the filename gets mangled into a hash like that. You’d think that’d be a matter of just passing a parameter as part of the image processor config, but in several of these frameworks, you’d be wrong. At least in 11ty I found some instructions in their docs to override things, but in Astro I was just out of luck, unless I wanted to store my images separately in the “public” folder.
Another recurring gripe I have is that the default markup is just markdown. Frequently either GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM) or CommonMark. These are fine as far as markdown goes, but they’re kind of limiting when you want to do anything more nuanced than basic formatting. Even things as common as changing the alignment for an image don’t have a generally agreed process. At which point, the question becomes: how hard is it to extend things to let you do stuff you want to do? 11ty lets you mix in a whole pile of different templating tools (Nunjucks, Handlebars, Liquid, etc), and extend things to add your own shortcodes and filters to let things work how you want. Astro gives you a few different markdown flavors, so you can go with markdown, MDX, or markdoc. From there, both MDX and markdoc have methods to extend your behavior. Personally, I’m actually more inclined to use a different markup entirely, and write everything in AsciiDoc, which I’m very comfortable with from work, and is designed to let you do the various bits of formatting you’d want to do in documentation (or a blog post, or an article/essay). The options for SSGs that support AsciiDoc, though, are quite a bit more limited — I’m aware of basically just two, Antora (which is oriented around documentation, not around blogging), and Hugo (which I should really give another shot).
So yeah, that’s basically where all that is sitting. Frankly none of the things I just griped about are all that important, but it’s been taking up that headspace I’d be usually using for writing on here, so figured I’d share. I’ve been dusting off one of my other random sites to use as a test bed — when I actually have something to share, I’ll be sure to mention it. The goal is something that feels frictionless to write and post in, and unfortunately the path to get there has been feeling pretty fraught.
