Moonbase

I looked at a number of different software packages to replace Hobix, but none of them really appealed. The best two candidates were Jekyll and Whisper, but Jekyll is a little too heavily focused on blogging specifically (a problem with Hobix too, though it wasn’t quite as bad), and Whisper isn’t a static site generator.

So, in classic NIH tradition, I eventually wrote my own static site generator, Hx. It’s pretty raw and not especially fast (though it does the job faster than Hobix), but it’s pretty straightforward and flexible. It has no particular baked-in knowledge of what a “blog” is: it’s just a graph of generic filters which enumerate pairs of paths and documents. Throw in liquid templates, and it’s enough to do everything I need for now.

For the curious, here’s what the hx-config.yaml for this site presently looks like:

---
require:
  - site-hacks
options:
  base_url: http://moonbase.rydia.net/
  template_dir: templates
  output_dir: site
  lib_dir: lib
  links:
    - url: http://twitter.com/mentalguy
      name: "@mentalguy"
    - url: http://inkscape.org/
      name: "Inkscape"
    - url: http://lastbus.rydia.net/
      name: "The Last Bus"
    - url: http://rydia.net/
      name: "rydia.net"
  default_author: mental
sources:
  entries:
    filter: Hx::Backend::Hobix
    options:
      entry_dir: entries
    only: mental/blog/**
    sort_by: created
    reverse: true
    cache: true
  blog: # alias for editing
    source: entries
    strip_prefix: mental/blog/
  indexes:
    source: entries
    filter: Hx::Listing::RecursiveIndex
    cache: true
  front_page:
    - source: indexes
      only: index
    - filter: Hx::Listing::Paginate
      options:
        page_size: 10
  sections:
    - source: indexes
      except: index
    - filter: Hx::Listing::Paginate
      options:
        page_size: 40
  feeds:
    source: entries
    filter: Hx::Listing::RecursiveIndex
    options:
      limit: 10
    only:
      - index
      - mental/index
      - mental/blog/index
outputs:
  - source: entries
    filter: Hx::Output::LiquidTemplate
    options:
      extension: html
      template: blog-entry.liquid
  - source: front_page
    filter: Hx::Output::LiquidTemplate
    options:
      extension: html
      template: front-page.liquid
  - source: sections
    filter: Hx::Output::LiquidTemplate
    options:
      extension: html
      template: section-index.liquid
  - source: feeds
    filter: Hx::Output::LiquidTemplate
    options:
      extension: atom
      template: atom-feed.liquid

I won’t be doing any serious public releases of Hx for a while since I’m still smoothing out a lot of rough areas and there are sure to be incompatible changes in the process, but you’re welcome to poke around on your own.