The quest for the best static
site generator for image gallery
I've been spoiled by faircamp.
It's such a neat piece of software,
it creates a static site for my
music, and although I haven't
used it enough (I only have a few
track on damaru.yoga) I'm
fully committed to using
that tool for a long time.
Now I would like to do the
same thing with my illustrations.
You see, I like technologies,
but I'm very peculiar about it.
I want it easy, the easiest
way possible. This is a reason
why I use Gopher too. It's easy,
I start vim, I write, then
I can scp the file and an
updated gophermap and voila.
No coding, no scripting,
I can do it from any machine,
I can ssh in from anywhere
to write my piece. And I
used the tool I always use
for writing, vim.
The goal would be for me
to have all my illustration
in different folders, and
run a script that will
create a static site with
these different sub-gallery.
Yes I know I could code the
whole thing, I can html, but
it become boring in the end.
And again, I've been soiled
with faircamp!
So I tried a few solution,
some ruby gems, which were
promising, (I still like
Ruby and Ruby on rails,
but it seems like it's been
forgotten.) So all these
solutions were outdated.
Then comes all the
python solutions, oh,
so many python solution.
I've came to not like
python so much due to
all these different version,
and how you need to create
virtual environment in order
to run a different python package
so that you don't interfere with
the local installation of python..
I'm like, mhe, if the tool I
use adds more complexity to
the workload, and maintaining
it will be a pain, then it
doesn't really help in the
long run. The tool has to
be simple enough too.
But I ended up trying it
out Sigal. It's python, yeah,
but the installation wasn't
too troublesome, so I at
least got to the place of
trying it out, and it worked.
The only problem is that it
heavily rely on javascript
and doesn't gracefuly degrade,
if you don't have javascript,
you simply can't see the images.
https://github.com/saimn/sigal
You can see the generated gallery here:
https://gef.ink/illustrations/
Again, I've been spoiled,
fairCamp works with or without
javascript!
Next on my list is thumbsup!
It's a node package, through npm,
all right node.js is similar in
this nature to python, but I've
already done python so why not
give it a try. Npm installed
without any trouble, and running
the basic thumbsup -i created
a decent gallery. I tried it
without javascript and
it works decently. It's very
fast but the style isn't great,
I'll have to tweak it a bit.
This is the generated gallery:
https://gef.ink/gallery/index.html
I know that if you use python and
node.js on a regular basis, there
isn't much tech limitation, but
for me I don't use these technologies
often and when I come to run the
same command a year from now and
I'm stuck to update, fix, realize
some package aren't working anymore,
it's just a pain.
There is one more static site generator
that I want to try soon, it's a 1 binary
Go package (I like the sound of that)
which is going in the right direction.
One thing I really like about
fairCamp is also how you can
monetize your music if you want to.
This is something I think it could be
interesting, or maybe a static site
generator that would link to a print
on demand art work?
In any case, this is a good start,
at least it give me the impetus to
centralize all my illustrations and
start to categorize everything. I
have over 14 years of illustrations
to work from!
