Tortuga

[Lonami]

Tortuga shall live forever! I want to migrate from the great SSG Zola, because it does far more than I need, and I like simple software that I can change to suit my ever-evolving needs without having to bother anyone. Personal sites should be personal, and having a "simple but strong enough" starting point (this crate) is a great way to approach it.

I was unhappy with ~tortuga~ pagong mainly because we never actually "finished" it. At least, it wasn't in a state I was happy with:

• No clear vision. We did try to sit and talk about it. But without a use-case in mind and actual needs (at least for me), it's hard to reach a desirable point.
• Too much magic. Why does it decide to put the CSS files in a fixed folder? Why does it generate a feed on its own? What's with the creating a folder for every post on its own?
• Too many rules. Why do I have to place the assets in the same folder as the content? What's up with all the magic names header.md, footer.md and post.md?
• Too many extras. Really, we don't need to vendor pulldown_cmark's HTML module to do some magic with images.
• Literally unusable by anyone else (this point is just a joke, but it shows the project was not really finished): https://github.com/expectocode/pagong/blob/5d6ce8b2b6c105994d22af2d1761f644d6061452/src/blog.rs#L130-L133

So I've Rewritten It In Rust (even if it was in Rust already), with the following goals:

• Less magic overall.
  • Markdown files get turned into HTML.
  • CSS files apply to all sibling and children markdown files.
  • Atom source files must actually be valid, even if empty.
• More customizability where it makes sense.
  • The Atom feed is customized by literally filling it with whatever details you need.
  • You can write actual HTML to template the output. It uses a simpler, yet powerful enough, hand-rolled alternative to tera.
  • The Markdown files support adding custom metadata, in case your templates use it.
• Less rules in favor of what would be "obvious".
  • Just a handful special keys for the metadata of the Markdown files.
  • No shenanigans for the markers in the HTML templates. They're straight up HTML comments.

I recommend reading the entire source code and not go commit-by-commit to review this, as it is essentially a full rewrite. Next-up: switching over my blog to this. Might add some extra niceties though, as I feel a need.

[Lonami]

We've talked a bit about this and decided this should live as my fork instead.