4 notes link to this site.
Jan Miksovsky’s talking about journaling specifically, but this is great advice generally:
There are plenty of purpose-built systems [...] If you want to use one of those, go ahead. But at the beginning it might be better to do the simplest thing that could possibly work until you can identify your real needs.
Configuration:
Your ability to customize [...] is limited to the extent the developers have correctly anticipated your needs.
Code
Your ability to customize [...] is limited to the extent you can describe what you want in code
Learning to code gives you transferrable knowledge across projects and tools.
Your potential mastery of [an] RSS plugin data schema won’t help you in a different blog tool, or even using a different [...] plugin. In contrast, learning an interchange format like RSS or (here) JSON Feed is knowledge you can apply elsewhere, as are the data manipulation techniques
(This is a good series from Jan Miksovsky where he articulates all the reasons why I love Web Origami as a tool for generating websites.)
Jan Miksovsky, creator of Web Origami, tries building a basic static site generator by hand.
His takeaways?
First, and most importantly
This was pretty fun.
Simplicity = velocity
It was easy to keep the entire process in my head, so I made steady progress the whole time. I don’t think I hit a single real roadblock or had to backtrack.
Bugs were trivial
because I was working with plain objects and functions, the bugs were easy to locate, diagnose, and fix.
Experience gained is reusable
There were a very few cases where I had to look up anything. In checking the Node.js docs, I did learn about the
fs.rm()function, a call I’d somehow overlooked before which removes both files and folders. I’ll now be able to apply that new knowledge in future projects instead of having invested in a niche API I might never use again.
Source code size
He did this same project earlier with Astro and compares the size of the source code:
And then once you factor in dependencies (node_modules):
Both produce the exact same output.
Understandable
Oh, and the best part of this SSG he made:
any intermediate or better JavaScript programmer can read and understand it — including future me!
Jan tries building an Astro site in Origami:
I find Astro’s [abstractions] more complex than the foundation it covers up.
Sums up a lot of frameworks, TBH.