I finally got around to updating my website. Previously, I was writing out html and css style sheets and uploading them to a server like a caveman. I only had two articles - two game reviews, which had been there for about two years. Yes, the all too common case of starting a website/blog, and not continuing on with it. So, earlier this year, I remembered I had this website - and that I was also still paying for the server and domain. So it was time to breath new life back into the thing. I was thinking about uploading a short article about the Tunguska Event; using basic mechanics I calculated the possible diameter and mass of the asteroid. I then came upon the problem of keeping the site consistent along with inclusion of formating for the good stuff - math and physics.
So, ultimately, if you start churning out html and css for your website, you will come accross the problem of having to copy over html code to the new pages. Not ideal, because if you want to update the header, footers with dates new links etc, you basically have to change all the pages- unless you set up some sought of bash or python script.
Here comes in the SSG, or static site generators. I was going to use Blades, a binary SSG written in the language rust 🦀. Hugo was just too daunting to get into, with a lot of the documentation being convoluted. Using the casper theme, the website certainly looked more modern. And with SSGs you can just swap out the themes to a new one if you want to change things up. Not only that, you can just write up the documents in markdown, which the SSG just converts to html. So its much more streamlined. However, I then came accross the problem of referencing and katex generation in the articles. Blades had a katex plugin which did work well, but no plugin for bibtex style citations and references. You can get serious analysis paralysis with how many SSGs are out there.
I ultimately settled for Pelican. Although the website generation is slower (blades ~0.01 secs to Pelicans 0.17 secs for roughly around the same number of pages), it has a sane configuration file with many options, a good out of the box directory structure, excellent documentation and heaps of plugins. Which allows me to generation references and katex equations with ease. Jekyll had a jekyll-scholar plugin, but then I would have to deal with ruby. Whereas Pelican is written in python, which I am more familiar with due to scientific work.
Lastly, the site looks very minimalistic with the bare bones theme. Which I like. I hate having to deal with tweaking bloated css files and javascript files for customization. So I made a little tweaks here and there, and now have a working site with pagination, categories etc. Now it's time to focus on writing.