Start a blog with Harp(kennethormandy.com)
kennethormandy.com
Start a blog with Harp
http://kennethormandy.com/journal/start-a-blog-with-harp
6 comments
This has been many peoples first reaction when using harp but in all honesty, once people start embracing the harp way (using the `_data.json` files) for their metadata this request quickly goes away. We have seen this time and time again.
Obviously, not many people working on the same site, but many people working on their individual sites. You have this amazing platform and just because of a simple but show-stopping bug like this, I (and probably many others) can't use it. I'd fork it and change that but I'm not happy maintaining my own fork. Allowing individual config files for articles is really important for companies, especially for documentation archives. I occasionally have a few thousand articles in the same directory, it wouldn't be maintainable to put all the metadata from those (for some files, it's half a megabyte of metadata I'm talking about) into a single file. Not to mention all the authors, trying to navigate through a single file and getting frustrated.
Harp is fantastic, but I'm still curious why the creators shy away from the static site generator aspect of it. It seems they really don't want Harp to be in that group, but I'm wondering why.
Great question. Harp is a great static site generator.
First of all, Harp works completely differently from SSGs like Jekyll in that it doesn't regenerate the entire application every time you change a file. Instead, harp only generates the static assets as it needs to (in-memory) to serve any given request and it doesn't spew out any files. This was throwing a lot of people off when they thought of it as an SSG because they were expecting harp generate a bunch of files and then serve those assets. So even though Harp has a `compile` function for exporting your application to static assets, it behaves and is built much more like static web server than a static site generator.
Second, Harp unlike Jekyll doesn't have a strict convention of how your application is structured with a `_posts` directory and a `_layouts` directory. Instead, URLs with harp map directly to your file structure exactly as a static web server does. So if you want the url `/articles/hello-world` you must have a file in your project called `hello-world.md` or `hello-world.jade` in a directory called `articles`. The mental model of a web server translates much better to this paradigm.
First of all, Harp works completely differently from SSGs like Jekyll in that it doesn't regenerate the entire application every time you change a file. Instead, harp only generates the static assets as it needs to (in-memory) to serve any given request and it doesn't spew out any files. This was throwing a lot of people off when they thought of it as an SSG because they were expecting harp generate a bunch of files and then serve those assets. So even though Harp has a `compile` function for exporting your application to static assets, it behaves and is built much more like static web server than a static site generator.
Second, Harp unlike Jekyll doesn't have a strict convention of how your application is structured with a `_posts` directory and a `_layouts` directory. Instead, URLs with harp map directly to your file structure exactly as a static web server does. So if you want the url `/articles/hello-world` you must have a file in your project called `hello-world.md` or `hello-world.jade` in a directory called `articles`. The mental model of a web server translates much better to this paradigm.
Crap. I was building my own solution for Node.js static website generation with https://github.com/thibaultCha/Miranda because I didn't know about Harp.
Very good tool, congrats.
Well, what doesn't exist yet is a static forum generator, so...
Very good tool, congrats.
Well, what doesn't exist yet is a static forum generator, so...
Nice! Really a coincidence because just yesterday I made a plan to create my blog with Harp and see how far that would take me, today I googled it and landed here, only to find that this was also posted today....
Looks good, is there any kind of javascript compilation/minification available? Doesn't appear to be with a quick test, but just checking.
What do you suggest to be able to have the <title> element on a blog post while using a layout?
Hey krrishd, if you’re using a variable as your title, Harp will use the correct one in the correct context: https://gist.github.com/kennethormandy/6834709
Thanks :) Makes much more sense now. Also, is there any way to pass metadata to a markdown file?
You’re welcome! It’s not directly possible, as technically Markdown isn’t a templating language. It’s explained a little here: http://harpjs.com/docs/development/partial#markdown
Depending on what you are trying to do, you could have your Markdown files “wrapped” in a partial, and do whatever you need to with the metadata there.
Depending on what you are trying to do, you could have your Markdown files “wrapped” in a partial, and do whatever you need to with the metadata there.
It's a great tool otherwise.