Comment by adityaathalye

Hah! Superfriend!

First... Love your site (clean, fast, easy on the eyes, no need for JS to read). And your writing... yours is a proper blog. I used to feel bad about not being able to "just blog" like a real blogger, but I discovered that what I really like, is to write, in order to think. So, my blog has become part of my Big Reason to write (a lot) locally, and I am very happy to publish giant-ass blog posts; longform thinking.

Second... I went down a very similar path to custom site-buildin'.

Reject Wordpress because it's the 2020s -> reject anything mandating npm, gem, pip, lockfile web-scale dependency madness -> just hugo (single binary, wow) -> hugo + ox-hugo -> ouch, yet another custom templating language, and no backwards compatibility -> should I just Wordpress like it's 2005? -> NO, wait. Now I know programming. -> Voila! `shite` [1] (org-mode content -> pandoc -> plain HTML-and-CSS website [2]).

[1] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite (dicussed here, that one time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34486596)

  Show HN: Shite – little hot-reloadin' static site maker from shell
  141 points by adityaathalye on Jan 23, 2023 | 60 comments

(The discussion will answer anyone's burning question about the project name :)

[2] https://evalapply.org

Third... Again... superfriend! 10000% same sentiment as yours:

> that takes exact same files and produces output that I fully understand e2e, becoming the project I'm most proud of

See my `shite`'s incredible documentation---animated GIFs and everything. Probably my second-best documented personal project (or tied for first-best with clojure-multiproject-example).

Things that give me inordinate joy:

- `shite` weighs in at ~300 Lines of Code (and why does it have 240 Github Internet Points, who are these insane people???)

- it is truly "serverless" - I don't run a local dev server even

- it hot-compiles and hot-refreshes on save - fully interactive local authoring (as well as live template modifications)

- since Feb 2022, it broke (only very slightly), after I distro upgraded Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS, because pandoc changed its default handling of line breaks, breaking layout of hand-indented "verse" text.

- Under 10 second full site rebuild, with 43 posts totalling over 100K words and over 40 more auto-generated pages (rss feed, various xmls, and per-tag blog post index pages). And I haven't even made it parallel yet. Probably will, if full rebuilds get longer than 30 seconds.

- The resulting site scores top marks on lighthouse and even image-heavy pages render fully in under a second on 4G mobile internet. (zero analytics, or tracking javascript).

- And my most favourite part: I've made Internet Friends because of the site! https://www.evalapply.org/about.html#standing-invitation

It's hilarious --- I've done such sophisticated work for work, but this little piece of personal software is my pride and joy... It makes me grin almost every single day.

May The Source be with you too! _\\ // (yes, I love mixing metaphors)