Oups, I did it again…
A while ago I was joking with @sebadzia about the fact that if you are not re-writting your blog generation mechanism from scratch every N posts, then you’re doing it wrong. It appears that I’m actually living by these words and have been re-implementing my own blog over and over again; maybe in the hope that it would motivate me to write more. This blog became an end instead of a mean to communicate things.
Here are the 6 engines I’ve used over the years (and this does not even account for the different themes that I used with each of them):
This means that the blog engine has been changed on average every 8.5 posts. Not too bad! Maybe the next one will be in Rust?
I think what made me switch this time is the fact that I’m actually enjoying TypeScript very much lately (I find the type system super neat, and already liked JavaScript tooling a lot); and I was a bit fed up by the build time of the Haskell version. The way I did it was most probably sub-optimal as I am by no mean an experienced Haskell developer. Last but not least, I was on vacation and had some time to waste…
The TypeScript generator is still rough around the edges but it’s working and allows me to build the site, watch changes, and serve locally in development mode.
I rely on the following packages to do the heavy lifting:
- @octokit/rest to interact with GitHub APIs (used to fetch static comments)
- chokidar to watch for files changes
- express to serve blog locally
- dompurify to sanitize final HTML
- highlight.js to provide syntactic coloration for code blocks in posts
- html-minifier to minimize HTML
- marked to convert markdown to HTML
Overall I’m fairly happy with this setup. The generator currently fits into a single source file (which should probably be split at some point) and generation is pretty fast: ~50 seconds from scratch (which includes installing all npm dependencies, generating posts and fetching comments from GitHub). Generating posts only takes less than 10 seconds, and most of the time is spent waiting for comments to be fetched from GitHub issues.
There are a few things I’d like to try or investigate in the future to improve:
- consider using JSX (with React in pure server-side rendering mode)
- consider writing CSS in TypeScript as well with typing
- add support for inlined math using KaTex (which I do not need at the moment)
- improve comments display with better rendering and support for reactions and emojis
And of course, I will try my best to write more content here in the future!