Friendship Ended with Publii, Strawberry Starter is My Blogging Software Now

Aw shit, here we go again... - Carl Johnson

Well, Publii didn't really work out. So what happened? Neocities CLI happened.

Basically, when I tried to post You Die in the Game, you Die in Real Life, I was out with my Steam Deck. I tried to use Publii to edit the website, but I was having issues because of the way Publii works. Basically, what I needed to do was export a backup file and use that, instead of pushing the site files to a Git repo. So that sucks, but whatever, I just added the story to the site when I got home.

And there appeared the second issue. I tried to update the site using a little program called Neocities CLI, which I had used before. Problem was, it wasn't installed anymore. No problem, I thought, I'd just install it again. Wrong. It was problem. You see, Neocities CLI is a Ruby program which you install by running gem install neocities-cli. This program absolutely refused to install. I tried so many things, uninstalling and reinstalling Ruby, messing with config files, nothing worked. I had to manually upload the index page and the story page. I didn't even upload the rest of the changed files, so the tags on the post didn't even work properly.

After trying off and on to get Neocities CLI to install and even looking into alternatives, a little while ago, I found something I could use instead, a framework for blog sites called Zonelets. Zonelets, however, was missing tagging and RSS. I then found out about Zonelots, a fork of Zonelets with tagging but no RSS, and Bumblebee, a framework with both tags and RSS. I initially went with Zonelots because the Python script included with Bumblebee kinda spooked me, but then I decided to just go with it since that took some of the tedium out of updates (you have to manually edit the Javascript file for each post in Zonelots, and also Zonelets). Working with HTML (or Markdown in the case of Bumblebee) didn't bother me since my chosen writing program, Wordgrinder, can export to HTML and Markdown. I'd still have to manually upload the site, but I figured I could just make that a separate section and have a standalone homepage. I could've done this with Publii, but the other issue would've still been there, so I decided against it.

Now, you might have noticed this blog isn't made with Bumblebee. Bumblebee is controlled by a Javascript file, and no matter what I did, it felt like it was ignoring the Javascript file. At least, I think that's what it was. Even unmodified, webpages acted like there was no CSS file. So I looked at Zonelet's page again, at the section where the author listed some forks and programs inspired by Zonelets. I saw one that looked promising called Strawberry Starter. I was hesitant since it was basically just a template for an SSG called 11ty and I haven't had any luck with SSGs, but Strawberry Starter's site has really simple instructions that are super easy to follow. It also has, in addition to tags and RSS, a simple function to upload to Neocities! I'm going to stick with my plan to use this as a separate part of the site, and hopefully, you'll see this post and many more to come soon.

That brings me to why I want to do this now. One of my New Years resolutions was to write more. Even if it's simple blog posts, I'd like to post more. Hopefully, this helps me do that. Watch this space!