M README.md → README.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ 
 ## H3RALD Web Site
 
-H3RALD.com was created in 2004 by Fabio Cevasco, a technical writer, programmer and IT enthusiast. It features over a hundred "articles":/articles/ covering a wide range of topics, from programming to writing, productivity and even traveling.
+H3RALD.com was created in 2004 by Fabio Cevasco, a technical writer, programmer and IT enthusiast. It features over a hundred [articles](/articles/) covering a wide range of topics, from programming to writing, productivity and even traveling.
 
 Currently, this site is fully static (minus a few AJAX calls) and is powered by the [HastySite](https://h3rald.com/hastysite/) static site generator and [LiteStore](https://h3rald.com/litestore/) (for the archive search functionality).
 

A contents/articles/hastysite.md

@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ 
+-----
+title: "Building my own static site generator"
+subtitle: "Why using your own product really matters"
+draft: true
+content-type: article
+timestamp: 1508087990
+-----
+
+It has been *over TWO years* since my [last article](/introducing-litestore/) on this site. I have been pretty busy with work and all and well... same old, same old. 
+
+It's not that I didn't have time to write articles, it's a mixture of different things:
+
+* I've been neglecting this site, in favor of other projects.
+* this site was running an old version of the [nanoc](https://nanoc.ws/) static site generator.
+* ...that in turn was running on an old version of Ruby.
+* ...and I am not really using Ruby anymore nowadays.
+
+I've always been fascinated by the [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org/) as a bold response to being subjugated by the proprietary web of Facebook, Google, Twitter et al. I am not a social user and I've never been one: I just can't wrap my head around the concept of essentially giving *my own creations* (content, in this case) to a corporation and to the whole world for free, without proper credit. 
+
+I've owned my own web site since 2004, and I am a proud believer of essentially all the [IndieWeb Principles](https://indieweb.org/Principles), simply because they make logical sense to me, and in particular the one concerning [selfdogfooding](https://indieweb.org/selfdogfooding) — a horrible term for a very noble cause.
+
+So I decided to ditch nanoc — although there's nothing inherently wrong with it, and it is also an open source project — and build my own tools to publish content on the web.
+
+<hr />
+
+### Choosing a technology stack
+
+I started programming with Turbo Pascal, then C, C++, Java, then I learnt PHP, then moved on to Ruby in the golden years of Ruby on Rails, meanwhile got briefly acquainted with Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, a bunch of esoteric programming languages like Io (see [this article](/articles/10-programming-languages/) for more). 
+
+More recently, I started using Javascript (the *new* Javascript reborn in the 2010s, and more specifically its [good parts](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do)) both in the browser and on the server, even at work. 
+
+I personally do believe that Javascript is a very powerful and expressive language, but it has its shortcomings -- both in terms of the language itself and its ecosystem. More specifically, I cannot believe we now consider *normal* juggling thousands of third-party NPM packages to build almost anything using today's Javascript. People are [getting more and more pissed off](http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how-to-program/) about this, and maybe someday the whole NPM ecosystem will implode in itself... But this is another story really. 
+
+Let's just say that I immediately discarded Javascript for this endeavor, not because unsuitable for the task (there are dozens of pretty decent Javascript static site generators already), but because I wanted to build something simpler to manage, in terms of dependencies and well... number of files.
+
+That's why I chose [Nim](https://nim-lang.org). I have been using Nim on-and-off in my pet projects for years now, and it is a very productive language. And above all, it produces small, fast-as-C, and self-contained executable files for many different platforms.
+
+### Functionality
+
+So what are the key features a static site generator must have?
+
+At the very least, the following:
+
+- Generate HTML files from a lightweight markup language.
+- Provide a way to manage content templates (and partial templates) for things like headers, footers, and so on.
+- Provide a way to store page metadata, and ideally to build custom logic based on it.
+- Providing an efficient way to manage assets, i.e. typically just copy them to the output folder.
+- Provide ways to customize paths and content/asset routing.
+
+This is the bare minimum. Then you could also want support for CSS preprocessors, themes, JavaScript minification, content reuse and more.
+
+#### Markdown Processing
+
+When it comes to picking a lightweight markup language, Markdown is a solid choice. It is readable and it comes in many flavors that provide just about anything you’d need to write an article. 
+
+A while back I created [HastyScribe](https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe), a fast Markdown processor based on Discount. It may not be the most standard flavor of Markdown, but it is probably one of the most feature-rich — besides standard Markdown features and what is already supported by Discount, HastyScribe also provides support for:
+
+- Content snippets
+- Transclusion of other Markdown files
+- Simple substitution macros
+- Custom fields 
+
+Those features essentially provide a very high degree of content reuse; not everyone needs them, but they are very useful for certain kinds of web sites and when authoring technical reference documentation.
+
+HastyScribe is also written in Nim, which makes it ideal for this project.
+
+### Mustache Template Engine
+
+Like with lightweight markup languages, there are tons of different template engines out there. Some can be used together with code, Other are logic-less... Mustache is one of the oldest logic-less template engine, often emulated and improved upon.