2026-04-14 Oddμ as a static site generator
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The End of Eleventy by Brennan Kenneth Brown (@brennan@social.lol) is
a blog outlining the surge in static site generator popularity. Static
sites are web sites consisting of HTML and CSS files that are served
by a web server. There is no server-side component to them. This makes
them very fast for readers.

There are a few drawbacks.

You cannot edit pages online, you need access to the files. Or, as
Brennan Kenneth Brown explained in a comment (see below), you can use
other services to implement the dynamic aspects: Edit pages in a web
interface of your page repository and use it's continuous integration
to generate the static HTML and publish it. I mean, it's technically
correct. But as a whole, the static site generators ends up being just
a small piece of a larger network of independent services, none of
which are entirely under your control.

Also, you can't have a search engine. Well, actually you can have
local search if you put the whole full text index and the search
engine itself into JavaScript files and load them from your web site.
That's how Lunr or Pagefind work, for example. That is, in order to
perform a search, you download the whole or parts of the index and
search on the client side. It can work. Specially if we're used to the
idea that images can be two, three or ten megabytes. Who cares if
downloading the index takes a bit?

Brennan Kenneth Brown's article talks about the popularity of dynamic
sites that can be edited online, that come with search, version
history and all that, at the price of being slower and clunkier. And
how the pendulum swung back again to static site generators. A
generator is a program that takes a bunch of text files (often written
in Markdown) and turns them into a static site by generating HTML
files with a template or two, and some CSS. Easier to write than
straight HTML, but also a source of lock-in. Now you need software to
generate the HTML. The article goes on to talk about the various
popular options: Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy (11ty).

And you know what comes next: How Eleventy got bought and how people
are sad, angry, disappointed.

I have no answer to that. I understand people getting tired of their
own creation. I understand people getting excited by users at first
and then weighed down by an ever increasing number of them. Even if
none of them complain or make requests -- it's still the weight of
responsibility. No more joyful tinkering and writing bugs!

All of this makes me think that I should write better (even better!)
documentation for how one would use Oddμ to generate a static site.
There's a command to that: oddmu static.

Sadly, the documentation doesn't explain how you would write blog
pages with names that start with a date (like 2026-04-14-ssg.md), run
oddmu notify to generate the links from the index file (index.md)
and any existing hashtag files for the hashtags you used (using the
tag #Wikis if the file Wikis.md exists).

There's also a half-finished implementation of oddmu toc to generate
a table of content for a long page. But then what do you do with it?
This should be integrated into the build process somewhere. Right now,
you'd probably have to do some scripting to insert a table of contents
into the HTML of the files that need it. A shell script that loops
over all the HTML files, runs oddmu toc, checks if it is long enough
(two entries?), and if so, pipe it into oddmu html to turn it into
HTML and then insert into the page HTML … you see how this is not
trivial. I need to do something about that.

Anyway, if you're trying to use Oddμ as a static site generator, let
me know. Let me know what didn't work and what confused you. I'm
interested in writing better documentation. But I also don't want to
crash and burn under the weight of responsibility. No danger of that,
yet! But I think it goes to show that the software should be as simple
as possible so that other people can take it and run with it.

As Oddμ tries to be both a wiki that can be edited from the web and a
static site generator, I'm guessing that's already a failure. Oh no!

#Wikis #Oddμ #Static_Site_Generators

2026-04-15. @brennan@social.lol commented on fedi:

> I use PageFind for search on my site, and it is brower-side, works
> well, and is speedy.
>
> You can edit posts from the Internet, you just need to edit the raw
> markdown files in your repo (if you're using git) or filezilla if
> it's on a server, etc. You just don't get WYSISWG unless you're
> using a headless CMS or Micropub.
>
> The great thing about 11ty is the plugins, I have the ability to add
> TOCs to pages but I usually don't find it necessary.

Thanks! And thanks for the Pagefind reference. I didn't know it. I
took up that thought about editing the files using separate services
in the blog post above.

Update. Oddμ now supports a marker in its templates (an "action") to
add the table of contents to a page.