---
title: Writing a static site generator for fun and profit
date:  24/3/26 
---

Tired of bloated Next.js projects taking up 100MBs of RAM on my VPS, I decided
to shift my personal site to a more minimal framework. Remembering [Luke
Smith](https://www.youtube.com/@LukeSmithxyz)'s old video about Hugo, I decided
to give it a try. I was thinking of writing my own Hugo Theme when I had the
"bright" idea of writing my very own static site generator instead.

> Enter **Kite**

## How an SSG works
A static site generator takes in a directory full of markdown files and
converts them plain-old HTML files while maintaining a theme. For my use-case,
since I mainly wanted a blog, the most important page would be the **post**
page.

The Page struct can therefore be defined as:

```go
type Page struct {
	Title   string
	Content template.HTML
	TOC     []TOCItem
}
```

## Parsing Frontmatter
Frontmatter is the small YAML-like block at the top of each markdown file
containing info such as the post title, it's date, tags etc. 

```go
type Frontmatter struct {
	Title string   `yaml:"title"`
	Date  string   `yaml:"date"`
	Tags  []string `yaml:"tags"`
}
```