The Blog Changed
Welcome Back!
If you saw my original blog, you'll notice that it's...gone. Why?
Well, you see. I started this blog using something called Arise. I want to get something on the plate ASAP: I really, really like Arise. I think it absolutely accomplishes exactly what it wants to do.
Here's my problem: It's a bit...inflexible. Before getting in to the whole ordeal on how I ended up here, I'd like to walk you through what exactly Arise is.
Arise is a Static Site Generator. It's meant to alleviate some of the headache of just running a simple static site. Think Blogs or other pages that aren't really rendering dynamic content. They're "Static" in the same way a bulletin board is static, the content isn't going to dynamically change while you're reading it. But new content is going to be added, and some older content might be removed, it's just how it is.
There are...a lot, of Static Site Generators. Wanna see? Jamstack has a big ole' list of them. As of writing this post in June of 2024, I see 355 total.
So, what made Arise stand out? I've played with and seen a lot come and go, some stick around, some don't. But what Arise does is that it takes the entire concept and says "This process should rely on nothing more than simple script to run some pipelines and publish stuff".
Basically, it's a BASH script that does some Git worker magic and ingests your posts, converts them to the format they want and displays your site. It's very cool, and I really digged how simple it was and how elegant it was. No relying on random npm packages working forever! No dependency hell! It was everything I wanted!
It wasn't everything I wanted
Well, it was...until I wanted to add an additional "About Me" page.
See, Arise does it's one thing so well...it can't really do other things at all.
At the end of the day, it's just generating HTML files, you absolutely can add additional pages to the nav menu. But it's a bit finicky, it won't inherit the stylings, you have to do all of that yourself and your basically messing with standard HTML/CSS which defeats the purpose of using a Static Site Generator (SSG). Well, if those pages rarely change, you only have to mess with all of the once and you're done!
But...it just rubbed me the wrong way.
That, combined with the complete lack of self hosting/previewing of any kind, meant you had to keep updating your site to see the changes applied. That was annoying, I didn't like that at all.
So, I went searching for something a bit different and I found 11ty which...is fine.
Look, It's got a lot of nonsense built in. Listing posts is a strange syntax I've never used before. You have to use layouts and other junk but once I got it all together it just...works.
My CSS works on all of my pages and I really like the tag system and applying different layouts depending on the tags! That's sick. So my Posts can have slightly different styling versus the main page. Which is nice. Further, It has the ability to serve your page locally! I'm doing that right now, in fact, as I'm typing this to make sure it doesn't look like complete dog shit!
Only...mostly dog shit.
11ty has it's own quirks. Trying to get CSS to apply to pages while deployed was really annoying. Apparently you're supposed to use the script file to add a passthrough function but...it doesn't work. I've tried a handful of tutorials, including the one on the 11ty home page, and it just won't pull the css folder with all of my styling stuff. It just doesn't work. So I have to have another script that's called on build that copies the asset folder to my deployed/website directory.
That sucks, but more importantly, the actual deployed folder doesn't update properly. If you add something new to it, it pulls it and it works. But if you delete or modify a file outside of the _site directory it doesn't delete or modify the old file!
So you need to have another script that deletes or otherwise modifies the _site directory to keep old stuff updated and keep everything from getting too bloated. It really, really sucks. But, for what it is...it works! Now that I'm all set up, mostly. It just...works...kinda.
What i want, what i really really want
If Arise shipped/was forked with the ability to incorporate any page I wanted. Such as marking a markdown file as a main page AND would have some preview methods...I would waddle back as quickly as I could.
The fact that the whole package is a simple bash script really speak to me. The fact that, long after these packages are no longer maintained and riddled with nonsense...the Arise pages just use bash, and it'll just work.
But! For now, this will do. If I get too far in to the weeds with 11ty, it might be a permanent thing which is fine. Now that everything is mostly set up (besides a few styling issues here and there), it's not so bad.
The End is only the Beginning
With that cliche out of the way. I hope you find your way back to my small corner of Hyperspace out here in the sticks. While I'm not exactly part of the walled garden of the "Modern Internet", I do hope you find some value in going for a drive out in the country.
Live with Aloha and the next opportunity you get, try reaching out to some family or friends you haven't spoken to in a while.
Many Mahalos!
