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Comment by cxr | Hacker News Reader

In your post you write:

> Just like every dev writing a blog, my first question was: What is the minimum set of features to maintain it comfortably?

Then you created a program in JS that requires NodeJS to run. But cool programs written in JS don't require NodeJS when it's not necessary. They just run in the browser.

PS: Really cool static site generators that shoot for simplicity don't require you to create extra template files written in a new, made-up template language. When you want to create a new post, you give it (a) the static files from your existing site and (b) the markdown for your new post. The "templating" engine inspects your existing posts (incl. e.g. class attributes) and then copies the same document structure into a new file, except with the right stuff (timestamp, title and heading, post content...) substituted in to the places where it's supposed to go.

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Something like this does the job for you...basically applies the template and whatever metadata you give to the .md file.

  for file in *.md; do
    pandoc --quiet --template template.html $file -o "${file%.*}.html"
  done

But I wanted a flexible way to reuse components. So I need the <partial> trick to support outer and inner partials in the reusable components. For example a form that I want to reuse on some pages, or a custom call to action.

Sorry, I don't think you understand. First, I'm not looking for help finding a tool that does what I describe. Second, that Pandoc invocation doesn't do what I describe. I'm saying no template file.

Let's say you have static site today with your lost post being "2022/03/31/working-on-a-new-tool.html". To author your new post, the tool could derive the template based on what the actual, HTML-formatted version of your last post looks like, and then it would substitute the new post content into the appropriate places. For example, where your previous post has a date stamp indicating it was published on March 31, the tool would put the date of the new post. Where your previous post has the title in an H1 or whathaveyou, your new title would appear. Where the main text of your last post appears, the main text of your new post appears. This would all be written into a new file. There's no need for an explicit template file.

PS: Pandoc doesn't run in the browser, either. You're already going to have your browser open to check the output. Its runtime is both powerful enough, and it's right there, so use it. No need to bring other runtimes into this.

Got any links for some of the "Really cool static site generators"?

Yes. I'm looking to remove NodeJS dependency, but I will probably have to switch languages since JS itself doesn't let me read files from disk, to run the preprocessing.

Browsers have supported file input elements and file drag-and-drop for a while.

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...>

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTML_Drag_a...>

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