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12752 :: My Website: Statically Generated Using Nim, MD4C, Karax + Mummy

• mig (orginal) [2025-03-31T01:13:51+02:00] view original

  I recently updated my site to use Nim, MD4C, Karax & Mummy. I saw a HN thread relating to using C and MD4C to generate a website and left a comment about my setup - I thought I'd share this here.

  This is not a general static site generator. I built this generator to be very specific to my site (e.g. I have a private note section). If you want to use it for your own site: fork or copy the code. I could generalize the code to make a general static site generator: but it's honestly not worth my time and writing code is more flexible than jugging with configuration files (code is data too).

  Previously I was using GatsbyJS, but had a lot of trouble with dependencies constantly updating & copying the setup to another computer (dependencies got too old with my lock files) and generally it was slow to generate the site. I was more frustrated than anything. Could I have used gist or simple markdown files for my blog? Probably but I thought I'd use Nim for this.

  Now I can generate my site in <<0.1s - even if I include all my private notes (710 markdown files).

  Here's my site: https://miguel-martin.com/ and the source code: https://github.com/miguelmartin75/miguelmartin75.github.io

  The site/codebase features:

  • KaTeX for latex rendering (yes this is JavaScript that is executed when the DOM loads, see the JS code here)
  • Utterances for comments (yes, more JS)
  • MD4C to translate markdown files to HTML, see Nim bindings here and usage
  • YAML metadata (I wrote a limited/simple YAML parser for my needs) with the data accessible during generation, e.g. see here
  • A local development HTTP server written in Mummy. Refresh the page to re-generate the Markdown. It should be simple to add websocket support to enable auto-refresh when files change.
  • Easy deployment to GitHub Pages (uses git worktree to deploy), via nim publish

  Here's how I use it:

  • Run nim init to enable deployment/publishing the site (using git work trees)
  • See my config.nims for all nimscript tasks
  • Serving it locally before deploying is as easy as nim dev
  • Serving it locally with my private notes (710 files): nim devpriv
  • Generating the site: nim gen
  • To publish the site: nim publish

  Here are some codepointers if you want to fork the code:

  • Generate a route
  • Generate the whole site - this is the main entry point for the CLI - note I use cligen

  Now there's one major thing left for me to do: write content!

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• Isofruit (orginal) [2025-03-31T15:20:18+02:00] view original

  Nice! As a short thing for clarity purposes (which I guess, can also be seen as an a11y thing):

  I'd recommend to remove the text-decoration:none rule in styles.css line 21. Currently, your links that are within the text (the ones to Ego-Exo4D and Ego4D) are basically indistinguishable from normal text. Link underlines may not be terribly pretty, but that's because links are intended to stand out from normal content in order to inform the user they're special.

  Also a small alt-text in your picture for those using screenreaders would be pretty nice, like "Friendly smiling man in a blue shirt with black hair and a short beard", something to give those with less sight a nice impression of you ;-)

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