Announcing Collards

You may have noticed my site going through some substantial changes lately. I've been working on another static site generator. Collards is a pseudo successor to coleslaw which I wrote ages ago just to get off wordpress.

I started working on collards properly back in August and switched over to using it in production in December. I've been surprised how much I enjoy noodling on it. Part of it is probably that I don't program nearly as much as I used to as an engineering manager. Part of it is the joy of scratching my own itch as I rebuild my site.

Either way, I just released version 0.5 and I think at this point it might actually be useful to other people. There is a healthy amount of documentation but not a terribly easy way to install it yet.

At some point, I'll likely try to provide static binaries for linux but there are some more tweaks and "ease of use" things I'd like to handle first. If you're willing to install sbcl, git clone the repo, and run make, you may find a useful command line tool for building sites quickly with CSS and a bit of markdown.

Then again, you could always be sensible and just use Eleventy, Hugo, or Jekyll. 😉

The primary motivation for writing Collards was to support Static Pages which coleslaw never handled all that well. I didn't want to hack on coleslaw either because I bequeathed it to the existing users (and it never grew a test suite, mea culpa). But I also felt confident I could do a better job now than I did 10 or 12 years ago when I wrote coleslaw.

Along the way, I grew features like a nice CLI interface, a local server to live preview content, post summaries, wikilinking between pages to allow easily publishing personal Notes, and so on. I'm a bit proud of where the project has wound up. Now I just need to write more about the music I'm enjoying and share some pictures of the family dogs.

Cheers.