I wanted to host a blog to occasionally write about topics that interest me, and about experiences I've had. However, I don't have much need for static site generators outside of this use case, so it seemed redundant to learn Hugo or Jekyll, and I like to do things myself anyway. So I wrote a short Bash script (blog) as my own little static site generator. It has everything I'd want from it.

From ./blog -h:

Usage of this tiny static site generator: 
-n / --new         create a new post 
-b / --build     build the full site 

To elaborate on this, I took inspiration from Hugo, and used comments at the start of the file to give basic information about the pages to build. For example:

<!-- 
page_title: Title of a Blog Post 
page_description: This is the description of a blog post.  
page_status: published 
page_date: 2021/11/20 
-->

The minimum a post needs to be published is a page_status: published, and a page_date. A static page is definied by not having a page_date. For example, you can create an "about" page by haing a post called about.markdown and;

<!-- 
page_title: About Page
page_description: This is the description of the about page.
page_status: published 
-->

It creates a folder about with an index.html file in there with this content.

You can use page_head: to let the script know you want that page to generate with a large heading style (this simply changes what tag the bulk of the page is in).

This setup doesn't really have anything linking it to a particular domain. I really just want this to be very simple to use. It should be git clone'd into your website directory, and from there, run the script with ./blog (chmod +x if it's not executing).

If you have any questions please email me, [email protected].