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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

I spend a lot of time blogging but all I use is a ~50 line Python file that converts my markdown pages to HTML, adds my template, and generates the ToC page. Then I push to GitHub Pages.

I can't imagine needing more than that. Why are these blog stacks so complex?

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Speaking for myself at least, after you've been blogging for a quarter century or more there are some nice features you might want like pagination of your table-of-contents, RSS feeds (do it, everyone should do it), support for redirects so that ancient links mostly work across those decades (I've kept redirects from like three or four blogging systems now), tags pages for finding lost treasures and silly things. I been on both sides of "needing" comments tools over the decades, similar with things like WebMentions. With so much of blogging on social media WebMentions don't seem that big a deal this decade as it was in the one where every other person (in college) had at least one Blogger.com Blog or LiveJournal and a lot of discussions were cross-links between blogs.

Admittedly most of my blogging history has been something of a path towards simplification from hand-rolled PHP+MySQL, with custom "forum code" markup language, stuff before "blogging" was even an agreed upon term for it (and before Markdown was anywhere near as pervasive), to complex third-party beasts like Drupal, to homegrown Python (and reStructuredText), to very simple SSG tools (these days still Jekyll, but I don't like working in Ruby much, so I keep debating a switch to Lume but I don't think its Redirects plugin is yet compatible enough with GitHub Pages for my liking and I haven't tested its RSS support yet, both of which are personal hard requirements).

TBH RSS feed on a blog should be table stakes.

Preferably with full content unless you're doing some Substack personal branding "subscribe to my paid newsletter" -crap.

I had a similar setup in the past. The current stack can be explained by:

1. I don't want to rely on any external SaaS but my VPS. No github action to rebuild the site or anything like that.

2. I want to be able to post from multiple devices, which means that SSGs add more friction cause I'd need to make sure the source is up to date on all machines I am trying to post. It is not a hard problem, but opening an editor online and posting is much easier. The key to blogging is reducing friction.

Sometimes people just want to have fun

I just write HTML directly (and use GitHub pages)

I had that thought too. My own blogging engine is ~100 lines of lua that accomplishes the same as you describe, plus RSS, with one additional library for markdown parsing. The author mentions Mustache templates and WebMentions, but ten dependencies still seems like a lot; I wonder what they are.

The dependencies are

    cmark
    dkjson
    etlua
    hasher
    lsqlite3
    lua-markdown-extra
    luafilesystem
    lub
    lustache
    multipart
    penlight
    uuid
    yaml
    http
    gumbo
    sleep
    bbcode
    cookie

Many of the dependencies are there to support the posts that are legacy posts coming from my previous SSG. I imported them into the database and they require Yaml and other dynamic features. Some dependencies like gumbo, http, multipart are all there to support indieweb features such as webmentions and micropub.

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