Comment by amitp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amitp | Hacker News Reader

Author here. A surprise seeing this on HN!

The context: I'm writing my own blog software for various reasons [1], including my desire to post less to social media. As much as possible I'm trying to reuse the build system for the rest of the site, including the template. I have worked on and off on this for the past two months and I expect to keep adding features for another month or two. I'm currently adding categories not only for the blog but to the whole site. After that I'll work on archives by month. And I want to import the 21 years of old blog content [2] which is stored on blogger.com, and put it on the new blog, which is just a folder [3] on my existing site.

I'm writing some blog posts to test out the workflow (integrating into emacs, my build script, an internal status page) and also various content types (images, video, source code, figures, links). Each time I post I find some more things to tweak.

This post to HN made me realize that it's not labeled as a blog post. Oops. I guess that's one of the downsides of reusing the exact same template! So another tweak coming…

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2024-03-08-new-blog/

[2] https://simblob.blogspot.com/

[3] https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/

> I'm writing my own blog software for various reasons [1], including my desire to post less to social media. As much as possible I'm trying to reuse the build system for the rest of the site, including the template.

After I finished Crafting Interpreters, I took the build system I wrote for that and wrote a static site generator for my blog using it. It's so much better than what I was using before (Jekyll). The performance is literally 100x faster. It produces exactly the output I want.

I realize "write your own static site generator" isn't the right answer for lots of people, but given how much existing technology you already have for your main site, Amit, I bet it's definitely the right answer for you.

Hi there, long time.

I'm a big believer in crafting whatever you personally need, whether interpreters or generators.

That's great to hear! Thanks!

In the early days of the World Wide Web I wrote a static site generator using makefiles. Because there was nothing ready-made for that.

As "make" is intended to track changes and only update when dependencies have changed, it was very fast on the computers at that time (that we'd call slow now).

Thank you! Your work really helped fuel my interest in programming, and it's always stood as my exemplar for how to explain a concept efficiently.

minor typo: Dijsktra maps should be Dijkstra maps

It's from the word dijk and the suffix -stra, meaning roughly "In the neighborhood of a dike"

One can only presume his forebears in the Napoleonic era lived near a dike.

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