author: Tyson Liddell
tags: misc

Static site generation issues

UPDATE: The following issues have since been fixed.

I tried to get this blog up and running again after it lay dormant for a few years. Unfortunatly, I ran into a few issues:

• The current setup uses the static site generator Jekyll to convert my markdown to HTML.
• I followed the Jekyll guide to install Ruby and attempt to get everything set up.
• Ran into issues with Ruby not finding gems (sudo vs non-sudo install)
• bundler tool in my Gemfile.lock was quite old and Ruby initially had issues trying to auto-downgrade it.
• A bunch of dependencies were missing after I ran bundle install, not sure why.
• Jekyll installs a large number of dependencies for a task that is not that complex as a user (.md -> .html).
• Ruby makes a bit of a mess of my system, since I don't understand it.

Given all of this, I think I should write my own static site generator that can convert Markdown to HTML. I don't need anything fancy, but it should be free of all external dependencies. I just need a simple CLI tool (a dependency-free binary) that can parse my simple flavor of markdown and convert it to HTML.

TODO: Check if a tool like this already exists. Search for "dependency free static site generator".

TODO: Consider just keeping all thoughts together in pure Markdown. Do I need to convert these to HTML? Could I just have a single page with a list of links to raw .md files? Might be easiest.