s4g (Stupidly Simple Static Site Generator) is an in-place static site generator, meaning processed files are stored right next to their sources. This simplifies composing (source dir layout is finished website layout; static assets no longer need to be moved around) and publishing (simply rsync/git push your whole dir). It aims to be beginner-friendly while encouraging users to fiddle with html/css. To that end, the core feature set is intentionally simple:

• Finds all *.dj files, generates *.html in the same place
  • Per-page metadata allows using custom template
• Generates home page, which is just a predefined index.dj + custom template. This means the user is free to swap in their own custom home page.
• Generates RSS/Atom feed
• Generates redirects from a redirects.txt file
• Post series
• Arbitrary navbar links, custom footer

Quality-of-life features:

• Livereload with no browser plugin (works but currently polls which is noisy, should probably upgrade to websockets)
• Shows user error messages on the livereloaded web page

There's a sample site up at https://nhanb.github.io/s4g/about/. I'm also using s4g to generate my own blog: https://hi.imnhan.com/s4g.

The markup language of choice is Djot because it's the only Markdown derivative that actually tries to be both unambiguous and extensible.

Currently works on Linux. It should also work on macOS and Windows (probably with a tweak to how it calls nodejs), but I'm not testing that.

Requirements: go (build), node (runtime).

sudo pacman -Syu go nodejs
go install go.imnhan.com/s4g@latest

# Create new site
s4g new -f ~/my-blog

# Run program, which:
# - listens to changes and automatically re-generates
# - starts a local HTTP server for preview, also livereloads on changes
cd ~/my-blog
s4g

Documentation

Distant TODO. Maybe I'll write a blog post and call it a day.

Potential nice-to-haves

• When cleaning up outdated files from manifest, delete empty dirs too
• Checked internal links (link to other article, to other article's asset)
• Warn when linking to redirected content
• Minify/prettify HTML

Dev notes

writeablefs is admittedly an unnecessary abstraction. The prospect of replacing the native filesystem backend with something else is highly unlikely in the first place. I simply wanted to get used to the ergonomics of programming portably against an FS interface. I've already violated that in my recent commits anyway. When I'm sufficiently bored I'll most likely remove it wholesale.