Burger.
A brief look at my site generator, nng
Written October 17, 2024
I switched my website from my old website generator, needleful's personal site generator, to a full rewrite in Prolog, needleful net generator.
It was a fun little project, so I wanted to talk about it.
Why do I have my own site generator?
npsg and nng are both static site generators. Static site generators are kind of a solved problem, with dozens of them already available.
I made my own because I wanted to make a lightweight site without writing a bunch of duplicate HTML, but I didn't want to learn a bunch of stuff about an existing system. You look at Hugo or something, and there's a whole world of things I'd have to learn:
- How to structure the file system.
- How to make templates
- How to make themes. This isn't even in the documentation. I'm just linking some guy's blog.
I already know a decent amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so it wouldn't make much sense to learn a whole new layer of stuff on top of that for a simple personal site.
Plus, I just like making tools.
How the generator works
My site is split into templates and pages.
For each folder, I first gather up all the templates. For a simple example, let's just look at a test templates.
<template name='with-params'>
<param name='hello'/>
<content>
<p>Hello, <i>[[hello]]!</i></p>
</content>
</template>It has one parameter, hello, and it generates some content, swapping [[hello]] with whatever we put in the page.
Using the template would look like this:
<with-params>
<hello>Gamer</hello>
</with-params>And that generates the resulting HTML, unsurprisingly:
<p>Hello, <i>Gamer!</i></p>There's also conditional statements, lists, expressions, and all the other things you would probably want:
<!-- a random example -->
<when val='n mod 2 == 0'>EVEN NUMBER DETECTED</when>
<!-- some snippets from my comics template -->
<foreach list='sources' it='i'>
<img class='comic' src='/[[source]]' alt='Comic: [[title]] page [[i+1]]'/>
<br />
</foreach>
<match val='src_file_exists(page + 1|".page.xml")'>
<true>
<li><a href='/comic/needleful/[[page + 1]].html' class='align-right'>Next</a></li>
</true>
<false>
<li>Come back later!</li>
</false>
</match>It lets me focus on making content when I need to, but creating new templates is basically the same as making a regular HTML page.
My original solution was written in C# and .NET, but it was pretty limited.
- It didn't allow any templates within templates. Every type of page had to duplicate all the common stuff.
- It was verbose and hard to modify.
- I use C# at work and don't like my personal projects using the same tech stack.
The killer feature was finding a Markdown parser for Prolog, which I now use for the blogs.
My entire site generates in about 0.6 seconds. It's not smart enough to detect if a file needs to be regenerated, so that's the time to compile all 56 pages.
I think it's pretty cool.