From 0e0fcec7287f4d87985a3cfbcdef4c5570b19aa5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Nicol=C3=A1s=20Ortega=20Froysa?= <nicolas@ortegas.org>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 13:50:01 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Blog: add post on static site generation.

---
 .../2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php |  6 ++
 ...2025-02-27-static-site-generation.html.php | 57 +++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 63 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php
 create mode 100644 src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.html.php

diff --git a/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php b/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b14dd03
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php
@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+<?php
+$title = "Static Site Generation";
+$description = "My new way of generating my website (again).";
+$created = "2025-02-27";
+$updated = "2025-02-27";
+?>
diff --git a/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.html.php b/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.html.php
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3e71be0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/blog/2025-02-27-static-site-generation.html.php
@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+<?php
+require 'config.php';
+require '2025-02-27-static-site-generation.cfg.php';
+require 'templates/blog-header.php';
+?>
+
+<p>
+Over the course of the decade (maybe more) that this website has been around
+I've gone through a few different frameworks and infrastructure for it. Although
+usually this would be going back-and-forth between PHP and some static site
+generator. For a while I've used Saait,<sup><a href="#r1" >[1]</a></sup> which
+was perfect for my goal of simplicity, but was not at all flexible enough for
+what I wanted. It seems to be intended for a website that contains a single page
+and then a bunch of blog posts (not my setup), and so for a while I had a
+somewhat jury-rigged setup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing this as an issue, I decided to try my hand at writing my own static site
+generator. There were a few failed projects like this, but I normally ran into a
+few errors normally because of the language I would try to write the program in.
+There was a time where I would try in Rust just for the heck of it, but I would
+get bogged down by the compiler whining at me. Later I would try again in Bash,
+but that was silly because of all the limitations that Bash presents (even Saait
+isn't written completely in Bash). I finally started working on one in C (in a
+private repository at the moment), but at this point in my life I'm much too
+busy to actually work much on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ultimately, with all this going on, I decided it was time to try out static site
+generation with PHP. Confused? Just run the PHP program on one of your PHP
+scripts. It outputs the exact same thing. All I needed to do really was to write
+a script that would go through all the PHP code in my website and output it as
+an HTML file (or XML in the case of RSS and Atom feeds). The only caveat was
+going to be my blog, which could get messy because of how I would need to access
+certain metadata about my blog posts (e.g. title or date) in order to generate
+both the blog page (to generate the page automatically) or the RSS and Atom
+feeds. This I solved by simply having files suffixed with <code>.cfg.php</code>
+which would not be processed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this added up to the <code>phpsg.sh</code> script<sup><a href="r2">[2]</a></sup>,
+which I had added to my repository. It's licensed under the Zlib license, if you
+want to use it for your own websites. Hopefully I may continue to develop my
+static site generator in C, but until that's done, this is a decent substitute.
+</p>
+
+<ol class="refs" >
+	<li id="r1" ><a href="https://codemadness.org/saait.html" target="_blank" >Saait: a boring HTML page generator - Codemadness</a></li>
+	<li id="r2" ><a href="https://code.ortegas.org/nortega/themusicinnoise-site/src/commit/07527f8e33aa6ed2ffc303c971f383190a7925aa/phpsg.sh" target="_blank" >themusicinnoise-site/phpsg.sh at 07527f8e33aa6ed2ffc303c971f383190a7925aa - themusicinnoise-site - Ortega Code</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+<?php
+require 'templates/blog-footer.php';
+?>