Author of the blog here in case anyone has questions.
It basically costs nothing to pre-render a static site, which then serves several orders of magnitude faster. I'm confused why anyone would do it this way in this day and age.
I know some will go 'oh well I want a web interface to create or edit posts in', nothing says you cant just implement that part dynamic and have it update static components on modification of posts.
I considered monitoring popular posts and prerendering those. Feels like code bloat for something that might not happen.
Don't get me wrong, this blog used to prerender everything. It kinda sucked to compute which pages were affected by a change in any given page as it might need to patch indexes, cross linked references, and so on. It can be done of course, or you can simply re-render everything anyway. The added friction for development and maintenance was not worth it for me.
It is my personal blog, it is not a personal branding site to show people my cool web skills or anything. If it goes down, let it go down.
> Your blog is your place to experiment and program how you want it
I 100% agree with your statement and people don't need to justify their hobbies. I've done really pointless things simply for lolz and because I wanted.
My question arises because I was surprised in how ... architected and (dare I say) complex the tech stack in your blog is. In my blogging days I wrote my own HTML/CSS and published it on a Internet facing server. Later, I've used CSS templates and Markdown-to-HTML to generate the static content. What is the purpose of Lua and having a database and all the other complexity for what seems like a static blog? Again, "because I wanted to experiment" or "sharpen my skills" is a totally valid answer but seeing I don't have a background in web development I am inquiring to see if there is a technical reason for doing this. Would be curious to learn what, if any, technical problem warrants such a set up :)
The stack doesn't feel as complex to me because I know it well. Familiarity doesn't make it less complex but make it comfortable. The reason for the database is that it allows me to run queries. It makes it easier for creating "recent posts" and "posts with this tag" pages.
Lua is the glue that ties it all together. Yes, HTML/CSS can be used to create a full site but writing posts in HTML gets tiresome fast when typing on a phone for example. The way it is it has an admin interface that allows me to write markdown on my phone or edit a post. It is handy.
For my own personal projects it is less about technical reasons and more about what will make me happy. What brings the joy on and less about what is the optimal solution.
Does that makes sense?
I know its definitely smaller but I just want your opinions on it and what you might think of the language and I may be a bit sorry if this comes across as a little off topic but your blog really reminded me of arturo and my attempts on creating something like hugo in arturo but the project was abandoned mid way but if I remember correctly it was just some 50 lines of code to convert from markdown to complete website or even less since arturo's battery include markdown syntax as well as well as a web server and its written in nim which I cherish too.
I am genuinely interested in your opinions about it!
https://arturo-lang.io/documentation/in-a-nutshell/
It looks interesting.
I might play with it for some project in the future.
The creator is an extremely nice person and I am proud that he follows me on github. This might be the highlight of my github right now lol.
Came to learn from awesome-nim about the language and loved it from day one. There are a lot of ways of doing the same thing but maybe that's the point since its rebol inspired.
Fennel is absolutelly amazing, I love it. I just didn't had the need. I like Lua the way it is. I was a student at PUC Rio for a while, I fell in love with it there and am very familiar with it.