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A Simpler Blog

Previously I was using Jekyll for this blog. It worked okay but I disliked having the ruby dependencies and felt it was a bit too complicated for my intended use-case.

This was my Gemfile.lock prior to the change:

GEM
  remote: https://rubygems.org/
  specs:
    addressable (2.5.0)
      public_suffix (~> 2.0, >= 2.0.2)
    colorator (1.1.0)
    ffi (1.9.17)
    forwardable-extended (2.6.0)
    jekyll (3.3.1)
      addressable (~> 2.4)
      colorator (~> 1.0)
      jekyll-sass-converter (~> 1.0)
      jekyll-watch (~> 1.1)
      kramdown (~> 1.3)
      liquid (~> 3.0)
      mercenary (~> 0.3.3)
      pathutil (~> 0.9)
      rouge (~> 1.7)
      safe_yaml (~> 1.0)
    jekyll-feed (0.9.2)
      jekyll (~> 3.3)
    jekyll-last-modified-at (1.0.1)
      jekyll (~> 3.3)
      posix-spawn (~> 0.3.9)
    jekyll-sass-converter (1.5.0)
      sass (~> 3.4)
    jekyll-watch (1.5.0)
      listen (~> 3.0, < 3.1)
    kramdown (1.13.2)
    liquid (3.0.6)
    listen (3.0.8)
      rb-fsevent (~> 0.9, >= 0.9.4)
      rb-inotify (~> 0.9, >= 0.9.7)
    mercenary (0.3.6)
    pathutil (0.14.0)
      forwardable-extended (~> 2.6)
    posix-spawn (0.3.13)
    public_suffix (2.0.5)
    rb-fsevent (0.9.8)
    rb-inotify (0.9.7)
      ffi (>= 0.5.0)
    rouge (1.11.1)
    safe_yaml (1.0.4)
    sass (3.4.23)

PLATFORMS
  ruby

DEPENDENCIES
  jekyll
  jekyll-feed
  jekyll-last-modified-at

BUNDLED WITH
1.15.2

I replaced all this with the following dependencies:

All these are found on any typical linux installation except cmark, which is a small C library/executable that only requires libc.

Github by default builds your Jekyll pages repository. Since I no longer use it, I now need to run make and build the html pages prior to pushing, but I consider this minimal extra cost. Further, it allows me to support mirroring this blog automatically to gitlab pages, which do not support Jekyll. This is a very simple setup. I added a .gitlab-ci.yml file, then enabled auto-mirroring in gitlab and pointed it to the repository on github. I finally configured Gitlab’s CI to run on each commit.

I considered writing raw html directly and having no markdown to html step but this seemed a bit too far. Minor things such as escaping code blocks and maintaining open/end tags kept me with markdown. My index page currently is raw html but I consider this a one-off (besides updating the index). The styling also is slightly different to the standard post.

I briefly considered using a simple template system, but considering my needs I decided against that and simply concatenate a few html files to build the resulting posts. You can see this in the Makefile (which contains only one essential step):

MD := $(wildcard ./blog/*.md)
TMPL := $(wildcard ./build/*)
HTML := $(MD:.md=.html)

build: $(HTML)

blog/%.html: blog/%.md $(TMPL)
	@echo $<
	@bash -c 'cat ./build/1.html ./build/1.css ./build/2.html <(cmark --unsafe --smart $<) ./build/3.html > $@'

watch:
	@while inotifywait -qq -e move -e modify -e create -e delete --exclude './blog/*.html' ./blog; do \
		make -s; \
	done

.PHONY: watch

Finally, a change I had been meaning to do for a while anyway was to adjust the path of the blog entries behind the /blog path. I’ve kept the existing links as extra html pages which perform a simple http-equiv="refresh" redirect to the new pages so existing linked content will still continue to work.

I’m pretty happy with the result. There is less to go wrong here for me and I’ve kept practically all of the same functionality (besides an auto-generated atom feed) while minimizing dependencies. I’d strongly urge people to take a step back every now and then and see if there current solution isn’t too much for them and if it can’t be replaced. I spent a fair bit of time reading Jekyll documentation, looking for plugins that I don’t need and determining how the templating system worked. At least for my use-case, all I really needed was to generate html from markdown and cat some files together.

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