Comment by soapdog
Comment by soapdog a day ago
Author of the blog here in case anyone has questions.
Comment by soapdog a day ago
Author of the blog here in case anyone has questions.
Thanks for the questions, let me see if I can address them:
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?
Why not choose Hugo (https://gohugo.io) or Zola (https://www.getzola.org ?. Both are pretty well-supported by communities and have tonnes of blog themes. (Hugo has a truckload and is the top-3 widely deployed SSG's)
What are your thoughts on something like arturo which I know is quite recent but it has a lot of features for scripting and an argument might in fact be made that it is in fact it might have too many batteries but it was an absolute pleasure to learn and I had a lot of aha moments in their discord server and the community was really pleasant to follow through actually.
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!
Took a while to find examples:
https://arturo-lang.io/documentation/in-a-nutshell/
It looks interesting.
I absolutely love Pollen. Do it! I switched away from Racket because I wanted less moving parts. With Lua (a language I know better than Racket) I feel I have a better grasp of all the parts. The main reason to switch away was to make the codebase smaller and easier to tinker with, but the pollen version was great.
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.
Why would you build your blog to fail if some article on it ever gets popular? The fact that the most hits you ever received was 50k in a week isn't relevant; a single important post could receive that in seconds.
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.
By large I agree, its just common best practices these days. Or at least have some components statically generated like the rss feed.
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.
People like to tinker. It's fine. If it blows up one time, then decide what to do from there.
I don't have a background in web development and have a genuine question.
> 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 :)