Writing a static site generator for fun and profit

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’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:

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.

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