How choosing a blog engine can make you discover a javascript engine alternative
When choosing a blog, many technologies are offered to you. I picked this one, and I will tell you why. In this story, you will learn how I discovered Deno
A little story about my blog search, and what my blog requirements ended up like. Jump to heading
I am not used to making blogs. I made a couple of them, on Medium. Since I like to step outside of my comfort zone slowly, I was looking for a solution that looked similar.
I found out about Ghost, it was a fit, and I already have a cloud server I could deploy it to. Great idea. Then, I had to think about how I would have to do backups of this. I was ready to make a cron, exporting a DB to a S3 storage.
That's.. was not fun. I need simplicity. I need to not care about the SLA of my cloud storage, and I do not wish to maintain a server up-to-date.
I ended up with a couple of requirements :
- It gives me the feeling of being in an unwinding place
- No infrastructure: static website generation, easy deployment in CDN/Github pages, or Netlify
- Little boilerplate: I am ready to learn new languages, but I want to maintain a blog, not a codebase.
- Neat look and feel: I want to relax my eyes while I write the blog
- Easy integration with plugins/styling
- Stack I master
Neat candidates Jump to heading
On my shortlist, I had these tools to investigate.
Astro Jump to heading
Astro is a nice website generator. It has a lot of options, customizations, and strong server-side rendering options. Its main selling point for me, was the easy integration it has with CloudFlare. During the setup phase, your project is already deployable. You do not need to have a public git repo.
It makes me discover Wrangler which I use for this blog.
What made me look elsewhere was the Astro syntax, too close to React for my tastes. My blog is my personal space, I want it to look different than what I do at my work! Honestly, the look& feel of Astro websites looks great, and I would recommend it to HTML lovers
Eleventy Jump to heading
Eleventy is similar to Astro: a static website generator. I took it at first because of the native integration of markdown files.
My mind then, subconsciously, tried to add a simple mermaid graph to it. Sadly, to make this work, plugins for it are using pupeteer, which I do not want to use. Mermaid's competitor, Pintora can be rendered in SSR, but has no native integration with 11Ty.
So, I dropped my requirement about doing easy diagrams within the blog. If I need them, probably, I will use .dot files, generated outside. I will cross that bridge when I come to it.
Browsing Eleventy themes, I found this one: 11r you will see that this repository is read-only, and by a small investigation, you will see that the author recommends now using Lume, which I tested
Lume Jump to heading
Lume is again a static site generator. It runs not on NodeJs, but on Deno. I will do another blog post about Deno, but the tl-dr is that it feels like a better node, from my devlopper perspective.
Lume has neat templates, alas, the best examples are not open-source licensed. I forked theme-simple-blog and adapted it to my needs.
Lume checks all the boxes: the static generation is neat, it is configurable, and the look-and-feel is acceptable to my tastes