write draft posts

content/blog/building-my-own-ssg.md

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+---
+title: Building My Own Static Site Generator
+date: July 6, 2025
+draft: true
+---
+
+*[SSG]: Static Site Generator
+
+*[homebrewed]: Self-made, intended for personal use.
+
+[zona]: https://sr.ht/~ficd/zona
+[Hugo]: https://gohugo.io/
+[Zola]: https://www.getzola.org/
+[Jekyll]: https://jekyllrb.com/
+
+[^jd]: [jdugan6240.dev](https://jdugan6240.dev/posts/custom_site_generator.html#why)
+
+Those of us in the open-source world tend to be very _passionate_ about what we
+do — and passion often manifests itself in _blogging_. Rolling your own blogging
+setup seems to be a rite of passage. It's a project of moderate complexity, fun,
+and not particularly time-consuming.
+
+Personal websites and blogs are very... personal. Why not maximize the control
+we have over them? Many of the programmers I respect publish blogs using a
+homebrewed SSG. I figured it was time to join them!
+
+This article is about how (and why) I built [zona], the SSG that built and
+rendered the very sentence you're reading. Without any further ado, let's get
+into it.
+
+[TOC]
+
+## Reinventing The Wheel
+
+There's no shortage of excellent SSG tools out there. [Hugo] is fast,
+configurable, and very popular. [Jekyll] is the default on GitHub pages, which
+makes it _(I'm guessing)_ the most commonly-used SSG by a long shot. [Zola] is
+tiny, dependency free, and _very_ flexible.
+
+You can certainly build some awesome blogs with these tools, and customize them
+as much as you want. For example, my friend Alisa uses [Zola] to publish
+[her blog](https://axlefublr.github.io/), which is a great example of how a
+minimal website can truly shine with the right styling and customization.
+
+So: if there's such an abundance of great static site generators, why did I
+write my own? JD[^jd], a fellow Kakoune enjoyer, puts it well:
+
+> 1. It's a good learning experience \[...\]
+> 2. Many static site generators are complex and take time to learn to configure
+>    \[...\]
+> 3. A custom solution grants complete control over how exactly the site is
+>    generated \[...\]
+
+My main motivation for starting work on [zona] was the third point: **complete
+control**. I don't think being a control freak makes me an outlier among Linux
+users — why else would we be breaking our operating system near-daily, if not
+for some obsessive customization?
+
+It's happened very often that I find some tool I like, and during the process of
+tweaking it, I find _something_ that can't be changed --- which ends up
+bothering me immensely. I figured that I'd rather avoid this experience while
+writing my own blog. This way, if something is missing, it's my fault, and no
+one else's.
+
+## Requirements
+
+The features I implemented in [zona] are informed by what I want from my own
+blog. The primary user is myself, after all! I knew I wanted:
+
+- Writing in Markdown with as little embedded HTML as possible.
+- A convenient live preview.
+- An easy way to write image captions.
+- Control over the Markdown parsing.
+- Declarative configuration.
+- An easy way to add new posts.
+
+## Gophers And Snakes
+
+I started work on [zona] in October, 2024. At this point, I had written a few
+(smaller) projects in Go, and I wanted to work on something more complicated.

content/blog/why-kakoune.md

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+---
+title: Why Kakoune?
+date: July 6, 2025
+draft: true
+---
+
+Blog post explaining why I switched to and really enjoy using Kakoune.
+