This is the first post in a series of many.

In a long journey to create the best blog the world has ever seen, I have attempted to use a lot of different software. Astro, Hugo, raw static sites… However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to use a static site generator, but not one that’s already done (ie: Hugo). I needed to write my own.

Why Start from Scratch?

Many years ago, I made a blog using Hugo. I remember it being extremely difficult to deal with the configuration and to modify the output to my liking. Also, if I wanted to do cool graph stuff with my blog or notebook (like a knowledge tree), there is no trivial way to get this working with something that I haven’t written myself.

Workflow

When I login to my computer, I see a terminal. I like to edit files directly from CLI: I’ve noticed it’s the only way to decrease the resistance enough for me to actually write anything.

To make it as easy as possible to write, I use helix editor in my terminal emulator, with all of my notes as individual markdown files inside a git repo. There was no way I was going to maintain a blog that I have to write in HTML, and no way that I was going to be satisfied with the CSS output of blog generators like Hugo.

I didn’t want to do any extra configuration with my raw .md files to make them special. So, I needed to write my own markdown generator that injected the special details that it needs.