Förvillelser

Forget about installing Jekyll, Next, Hugo, or any of the other mainstream static site generators out there. To make Förvillelser I opted for the Carl Sagan method:

If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe

I knew that I wanted a site generator that I could mess around with properly. Right now I am very fond of Elixir so naturally I looked at the elixir options out there. Obelisk immediately caught my attention because of its nice mix task UX. I followed the README to create my site, and I hit the first road block right away. Obelisk didn’t build out of the box. No problem, I updated one of its dependencies and continued. Next I tried to build my site, this time obelisk crashed and it wasn’t obvious why. That prompted me to look closer on its github page – maybe someone else had the same problem? Uh oh, lots of PRs with no attention, and the project seemed generally abandoned by its creator. One guy even wanted to take over the project but hadn’t gotten a response :(

Okay. That messed up my plan, since if I hack on this thing I’d like to give the result back to the community. Or at least have the option to do so. Forking seemed unfun, as did the prospect of debugging and fixing. Looked at Serum as well. Nice but not quite what I was after. Oh well time to roll up my sleeves and get cranking on My Own Static Site Generator! How hard can it be!? Haha!

I, as a software developer by trade, of course had some requirements. First I wanted my new shiny sites pages and posts to be written in Markdown. I wanted these documents to be versioned controlled. And I wanted to be able to deploy changes to my site with git commit+push.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

I got a first good enough version of Gonz together in an evening or so. I started working on Förvillelser early so that I could feed the Gonz development with fixes and features I needed for my particular site.

After a few more days of sporadic hacking I realized that I needed to publish Förvillelser somewhere to actually deliver value to my customer (me). Around this time other requirements popped up in my head:

• I want SSL on the thing. http without s is so lame!
• I don’t want to actually run a server myself. All the dev without the ops for this please.

With these in mind it seemed my choices were either github pages or netlify. I really liked the prospect of not having the baked HTML files in my repo, only the raw markdown files. Not sure why, I guess something something tidy, ridiculous nerd bullshit. That meant using netlify, because they can build the site for you. Cool beans 😎

I signed up and set up my site. Boom – “Site deploy failed”: make: mix: Command not found. Not sure why I expected them to support Elixir out of the box, but hey a guy can dream. Started looking around for some neat workaround or whatever. No real luck, but I did find netlify’s build-image repo – all open source and beautiful. I forked that, added erlang and elixir and sent a PR. Surprisingly it was approved (eventually) and even merged to master!

In conclusion

1. Build your own static site generator in a non-mainstream programming language X
2. Build the actual site
3. Deploy the site somewhere that doesn’t support X
4. Contribute changes to that place’s stack to add support for X
5. P R O F I T 🎉