Hey hi I saw on at least one post that you asked about people using Phantomake and since the clock is ticking and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to put in the time next weekend, I’m going to just make a giant mess in your comments while I still can. I thought about making an actual regular cohost post about it but honestly given the way I’ve used cohost blogging in your comments is the most appropriate way to go about it, probably. I’ll do the experiential narrative bit up top and questions/hopes/whatever at the end!
Stage setting: I’m a non-coder, but I am a glorified end user. Been computering and online for far too long and my ‘technical’ experience is largely limited to being able to follow tutorials well, have setup linux vps’ for servers for various things, but bad at troubleshooting and have zero actual programming experience. Got pretty good at being able to modify eggdrop bot scripts in the IRC days but that’s all dead knowledge. Command lines are fine and good, but everything involving repos and whatever is… doable but I have no idea what’s really going on, it’s just a tutorial trust fall exercise.
Other stage setting: I haven’t made anything yet. That’s the hard part! I’m still doing the fun tools exploration part. (it has been extremely fun)
Anyway I was getting to the point mentally where I was just going to start putting together a stupid website in the artisanal hand-HTML fashion of my youth because I didn’t want to mess with wordpress or anything of the sort any more and just do plain old static pages. The thing I kept thinking was how I really just wanted PHP include so I could at least make a navbar and a footer (miss you, frames). I kept looking at static site generators but every single one was absolutely bonkers for anything I had in mind and everything had way more presumption of being used by a ‘coder’ and not an ‘end user’, even a slightly technical one.
So when I saw the Phantomake post I was elated since in its most basic form I could just use it as a glorified PHP include to spit out a finished version of whatever I put together with some small template bits I could edit for global changes. And it’s just a single executable! (yeah sure so is Hugo but much like the rest of the field, Hugo is terrifying) And you put together that Windows binary mere moments after my discovery, so I didn’t even have to open a WSL terminal. Basically Christmas.
Started working through the examples. The Includes are really straightforward, exactly what I was hoping for initially, and then some. Haven’t played with templating much yet because design is not my passion but I have no concerns about figuring it out.
Started to stretch a touch when re-implementing the blog example. Reconfigured it slightly to account for hosting that is setup to do slugs/”pretty urls”, or whatever that’s all called, instead of doing the endless folder/index.html thing. Took me a while but I figured it out! Then I started thinking about how the pagination could be used to do so much other stuff, like handling serialized stories by using 1 item per page and using a unique folder or filename structure to pull the relevant pieces with getFiles.
Then I got to thinking about how the ability to make custom indices and such with the paginator could also be really useful too, and not all that hard.
At some point in this process I got to thinking about tags and wondered if I really cared. My initial plan wasn’t going to allow for them anyway, so not having them shouldn’t be a barrier, and the more I thought about it the less I kind of cared for personal web page stuff. Would I really ever be that prolific? I think some of the use cases could just be accommodated for via YAML stuff and custom indices anyway, for things I really cared about, if I decided to? Keeping some tags in the YAML just for my own internal use is probably the most practical use for anything I’d be doing anyway… let’s be real, my mess isn’t that complicated.
The RSS bit is the only piece I haven’t had time to fully chew over. I got the basic example running fine with minor edits, but got to thinking about more complicated use cases that I’m not even sure I can articulate well. I guess considering a hypothetical world where the website was updating both a blog and other serialized side projects, but wanted all the updates to be centralized in a single RSS feed, but have some one type of content be full text and the other type be YAML slugs.
Anyway, long story long, been poking around with it for several hours this weekend and have had an extremely enjoyable time. The whole thing felt very within my grasp in a way that every other SSG I’ve tried to use did not. Even when I’d started to get them working, just using them still felt like too much work. I genuinely haven’t had this much fun just noodling around with web stuff since I was 16 and found out my dialup provider gave us a whole five megs of web hosting. Phantomake rules and you could change nothing going forward and it’d still be tremendously useful. Thank you so much!
not having any js background is definitely narrowing my scope of imagination here, i'm thinking.