Comment by alan_n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alan_n | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well just off the top of my head, here's what I remember from most to least painful. Some of these are not 100% fixable though or I'm not sure the best way to fix them yet without adding more complexity or some sort of editor to my SSG.

- Layout & Routing - Having "special" pages is usually impossible with "structured" SSGs (like Hugo). For example, say you want a page that's your portfolio and only contains posts with x and y tags and you want it to look different than normal pages. Also see rss below. Or for example archives, where "/year" = "/year/index.html" but also "/year/month/" = "/year/month/index.html" and "/year/month/postname" = "year/month/postname.index.html".

- Sitemaps - I have videos on my blog and usually you want to add those to your sitemap properly. To do this I had to patch together a plugin to fetch the video info from the youtube api.

- Smart tags/embeds - Similarly I had to do something similar to fetch embeds from just the link like "[instagram]link[/instagram]". You have to do this with every provider you want, ugh, awful. Also means fighting the markdown converter you chose sometimes.

- Images - I run a blog with lots of images and different views of those images, so I need to have them all in at least thumbnail size and the regular size, sometimes the original as well, but not always. I used to batch convert new ones by hand but that was a pain. I eventually patched together a metalsmith plugin for this to automate the conversion of originals to "regular" (max post width) and thumbnails but it needs improvement. Edit: And I forgot, actually adding the correct attributes needed for lazy-loading, etc, to the image tags was also a pain.

- RSS, Most do not come equipped to handle rss, and available plugins are too simple (for routing that is, like having an rss feed per tag, per archive page, etc).

- Layout Language - Depends on the SSG, most allow choosing or these days are super flexible (e.g. Nuxt) but those that don't and just use one template language, argh! Template languages like handlebars are just not flexible enough. This was the easiest to fix though. I just use ejs now, basically allows any valid javascript, love it.

I can answer to your comment with respect to Hugo.

> - Layout & Routing - Having "special" pages is usually impossible with "structured" SSGs (like Hugo). For example, say you want a page that's your portfolio and only contains posts with x and y tags and you want it to look different than normal pages.

Have you looked at the "layout" and "type" front-matter?

> Or for example archives, where "/year" = "/year/index.html" but also "/year/month/" = "/year/month/index.html" and "/year/month/postname" = "year/month/postname.index.html".

The "/foo/ = /foo/index.html" or pretty URLs is the default behavior in Hugo, which you can also disable.

Regarding archíves, there are quite a few examples in the Discourse forum. I believe I have seen people implement the yearly/monthly archives using taxonomies.

>- Sitemaps - I have videos on my blog and usually you want to add those to your sitemap properly. To do this I had to patch together a plugin to fetch the video info from the youtube api.

You can have a custom layout for your sitemap. Also, you can fetch data from an API during Hugo builds. Look at the Data feature.

> - Smart tags/embeds - Similarly I had to do something similar to fetch embeds from just the link like "[instagram]link[/instagram]". You have to do this with every provider you want, ugh, awful. Also means fighting the markdown converter you chose sometimes.

Using API like embed.ly and such, and can get such data in real time during the site builds. Alternatively, you can create JSON/TOML/YAML/CSV of all such data, save it to the data/ dirnl before the Hugo builds and use that instead if you want to save on thousands of API calls during each build. This is the same Data feature.

> - Images - I run a blog with lots of images and different views of those images, so I need to have them all in at least thumbnail size and the regular size, sometimes the original as well, but not always. I used to batch convert new ones by hand but that was a pain. I eventually patched together a metalsmith plugin for this to automate the conversion of originals to "regular" (max post width) and thumbnails but it needs improvement. Edit: And I forgot, actually adding the correct attributes needed for lazy-loading, etc, to the image tags was also a pain.

Hugo has inbuilt image processing for a while now. Look at Image Processing in docs. It can do automatic centering, cropping, resolution adjustment, etc during site builds. You can choose to do that afresh during each build, or reuse the altered images from the resources cache.

> - RSS, Most do not come equipped to handle rss, and available plugins are too simple (for routing that is, like having an rss feed per tag, per archive page, etc).

Hugo has this inbuilt. You can choose to have RSS for each "list" page like home page, tag page, category page, etc., and even for each individual post if you like. All of that is configurable.

> - Layout Language - Depends on the SSG, most allow choosing or these days are super flexible (e.g. Nuxt) but those that don't and just use one template language, argh! Template languages like handlebars are just not flexible enough. This was the easiest to fix though. I just use ejs now, basically allows any valid javascript, love it.

Yes, Hugo mainly supports Go Templating. (And I don't have any complaints against that :))

I tried Hugo a long time ago. I believe some of the features you mentioned did not exist at the time. Also if I remember correctly, I did find workarounds for most of what I mentioned with Hugo, but the workarounds felt really messy and inflexible. I didn't mean to imply some things weren't possible, I mostly meant to mention it as an example of a "structured" SSG (by which I mean ones that aren't very flexible with their routes or how content is organized, i.e. they enforce a lot of structure).

Regarding archives, the problem if I remember correctly was getting them to nest properly, not just a "/archive" with all your posts, but lists at "/year/", "/year/month/", etc. until you reached the post. So no path was empty. I don't think I ever got that working.

Regarding embeds, didn't know about embed.ly. Seems great, but it's not free. If there's some free alternative I will definitely use it next time around. One of the main reasons I use an SSG is to keep my costs close to 0.

> Yes, Hugo mainly supports Go Templating. (And I don't have any complaints against that :))

Maybe I'm weird, but I can't stand 99% of template languages. They're too watered down. I want the full power of a programming language, or alternatively, some easy way to manipulate the data the template gets. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember Hugo having the latter either.

> I mostly meant to mention it as an example of a "structured" SSG (by which I mean ones that aren't very flexible with their routes or how content is organized, i.e. they enforce a lot of structure).

I still don't understand this point. You are free to put all your files in a flat structure like:

    content/
      post1.md
      post2.md

But if you want structure on your site, just set a structure in the content/ dir, and that will be mirrored on your site:

    content/
      posts/
        post1.md
        post2.md
      about.md

> Regarding archives, the problem if I remember correctly was getting them to nest properly, not just a "/archive" with all your posts, but lists at "/year/", "/year/month/", etc. until you reached the post. So no path was empty. I don't think I ever got that working.

You will find many themes, at least right now, that implement "bread crumbs". Even searching bread crumbs in the Discourse forum will yield a lot of results.

> Regarding embeds, didn't know about embed.ly. Seems great, but it's not free. If there's some free alternative I will definitely use it next time around. One of the main reasons I use an SSG is to keep my costs close to 0.

I just arbitrarily threw that name out there. While I am not aware of 100% free API services, there are a few I know of that provide that service for free with rate limits.

See:

- https://docs.microlink.io/api/#introduction (this works with OpenGraph, Microformats2, JSON-LD, and a lot more) - https://www.opengraph.io/ (this works with only OpenGraph metadata)

> Maybe I'm weird, but I can't stand 99% of template languages. They're too watered down. I want the full power of a programming language, or alternatively, some easy way to manipulate the data the template gets. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember Hugo having the latter either.

What kind or degree of manipulation are you looking for. The replaceRE template is pretty powerful for my purposes.. I use it to insert anchor links next to headings as I don't like using JS solutions to do that.

My problem is the mirroring itself. I don't want, taking your example, /posts/post1 just because post1 is under posts. You can get around this with some SSGs but this doesn't change the fact that they're path oriented. For example, I think it was possible to turn this off in Hugo, but then you had to do some workarounds for specifying templates because normally the templates have to be aligned with the paths. Plus it has a bunch of weird separated page "types" (archetypes, taxonomies, etc)

For comparison I now use my own metalsmith plugin which is the opposite of these types of SSGs. It only relies on the post metadata. I can basically say, pick all posts that match x criteria, use x route (it can dynamically generate them based on metadata variables), use x template for this route, and set basic settings (posts per page, etc). All from one place. Files can be organized however I think makes sense. There aren't different types of pages or anything. The only "special" thing I had to do was for /year/month/date/ archives, but I plan to remove that exception with the SSG I'm writing now.

Regarding the archives, bread crumbs are not what I mean exactly. I want the pages to also be paginated. So /year/ is not just a list of links to all posts or links to all months, it should paginate the posts list for that year as well if they pass the posts per page limit. Seems like this has never been implemented, see this four year old issue I found: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/448

> What kind or degree of manipulation are you looking for.

I often want array manipulations. For example, to create tag clouds. I'm sure it's possible, but I doubt it's pretty. With something like EJS, I can just have the logic in plain javascript, right above the div that iterates through it. I will grant you, I'm not sure this is the best solution. With the SSG I'm writing, I've been playing around with the idea of having a header or footer section in javascript for the templates, where you can run this type of logic and the variables will be available in the template. Kind of how when you use a JS frameworks (e.g. Vue which I love) if you have something complicated to iterate over, you remove the logic from the template. This would make simple templating languages attractive again.

Thanks for the links btw.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com