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	<title>Yet Another Static Site Generator Switch</title>
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<h1 id="yet-another-static-site-generator-switch">Yet Another Static Site Generator Switch</h1>
<p>2022-07-06</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re an RSS subscriber, I&#8217;ve probably blown up your feed reader (again). This seems to be an on-going theme with this blog. I can&#8217;t help it.</p>
<p>This website now uses my <em>new</em> Pandoc-based static blog generator: <a href="https://pblog.bt.ht">pblog</a>. I won&#8217;t go into great detail about it&#8217;s features (or lack thereof) - if you&#8217;re interested in that, check out the <a href="https://pblog.bt.ht/blog/pblog-intro.html">&#8220;Introducing pblog&#8221; article</a>.</p>
<p>The bigger question is, &#8220;Why the change?&#8221;</p>
<h2 id="wheres-the-love-for-shinobi">Where&#8217;s the Love for &#8220;Shinobi&#8221;?</h2>
<p>Switching over to <code>pblog</code> wasn&#8217;t caused by a dislike of using <a href="https://shinobi.bt.ht">Shinobi</a>. In fact, I still really enjoy the work flow that that plain-text focused SSG provides. The main issues that popped up for my own blog was <em>accessibility</em> and <em>poor user experience</em>.</p>
<p>I had multiple readers reach out and mention poor rendering of content in their RSS reader of choice. That&#8217;s kind of a <strong>big deal</strong>. I test that project as best I can with my limited access to all available RSS readers - but I can only test so much. It became one of those &#8220;Well, it works on my machine!&#8221; meme. So instead of spending an untold amount of time debugging every RSS reader known to man, I figured my best bet was to render things as <code>HTML</code>.</p>
<p>The next big issue was <em>accessibility</em>. Screen readers can read <code>txt</code> formatted files perfectly fine but since elements aren&#8217;t categorized everything ends up with the same level hierarchy. This can cause confusion between headers, list items, URLs, footers etc. For my personal use-case (sharing tutorials and covering design topics) it didn&#8217;t make sense to sacrifice user accessibility for minimalism.</p>
<h2 id="the-search-for-simplicity">The Search for Simplicity</h2>
<p>My initial thought process was to include some form of &#8220;plus&#8221; add-on to the existing Shinobi build script. The idea was to render <code>HTML</code> versions of each post and dump those into the generated RSS file. Although maybe good in theory, it ended up impractical because:</p>
<ol>
<li>No utility or existing tool could render the style of text-based formatting I implemented as semantic HTML (at least not without heavy customization and tinkering)</li>
<li>I was actually adding extra bloat to the Shinobi project (true minimalism is the point, right?)</li>
</ol>
<p>So, that option was ruled out pretty quickly.</p>
<p>The next option didn&#8217;t take me long to land on: <em>Pandoc</em>. I&#8217;ve used Pandoc for years and have nothing but great experiences tweaking it for my own needs. I knew that I could piggyback off the original <code>shell</code> commands in the Shinobi project and alter them as needed to incorporate Pandoc.</p>
<p>I honestly didn&#8217;t run into many issues while rolling this out. Fairly seamless!</p>
<h2 id="new-workflow">New Workflow</h2>
<p>With this new blog switch I also decided to try out a new <em>deploy</em> workflow. I&#8217;ve used <code>rsync</code> for the longest time but wanted to have something more GUI-based on macOS. I know, <em>blasphemy</em>!</p>
<p>Since I already have a Transmit license, that seemed like the best fit since it is designed specifically for macOS. Now my workflow process is as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>Write new posts in my root <code>posts</code> folder</li>
<li>Rebuild the <code>pblog</code> with <code>make</code></li>
<li>Use the built-in sync function of Transmit to mirror my local <code>_output</code> with my web server</li>
</ol>
<p><img src="/public/images/transmit-ftp.webp" alt="The Transmit UI in all of its wonderful glory (before I updated)" /></p>
<h3 id="wrapping-up">Wrapping Up</h3>
<p>Will there be bugs with this switch-over? Most likely. Will some URLs be left behind or broken? Possibly. These small issues will be ironed out over time. For now, I&#8217;m quite happy with keeping things minimal on the workflow side of things, while preserving accessibility and user experience with the output.</p>
<p>Thanks for reading!</p>
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