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+---
+title: Hello Again
+template: blog
+page_dir: /blog/2025/06/hello-again
+---
+
+# Hello Again
+
+Well howdy there!
+
+I've... kinda not done anything on here for a while now, huh?
+
+I mean, I updated the look of my website to function kinda like Windows XP, but I haven't really done much in the way of blogging since... 2023?!
+
+Damn, over a year and a half huh?
+
+## What I've Been Up to
+
+Where should I begin...
+
+Oh, I know!
+
+Major one first, I've got a girlfriend now!
+
+We've been together for about as long as it's been before my last blog posts regarding Apple stuff (she's not responsible for my lack of blogging I swear!)
+
+She's funny, smart, kind, sweet, and just a genuinely awesome person, I truly love her from the bottom of my heart!
+
+Anyways, enough of the mushy stuff
+
+I've been playing <a href="https://sao-if-en.bn-ent.net/" target="_blank">Sword Art Online: Integral Factor</a> since about March or April, and it's been pretty fun!
+
+Been playing a bunch of <a href="https://www.warframe.com/" target="_blank">Warframe</a> as usual, however I've kinda been sleeping on it for a while now, just kinda been taking a break, I'll be back on it again with a vengeance once Isleweaver drops on the 25th
+
+Also have been playing some Battlefield 4 with some peoples recently on PC (so nice to play this game again, miss my stuff from Xbox though), and also played R.E.P.O. for the first time as well!
+
+Outside of gaming stuff, I've switched all my computers (sans my media PC (soon TM)) to Debian, with ZFS on root, and ZFSBootMenu
+
+Been running Debian Trixie on them all, which at the time of writing this is still in Testing, but is expected to become Stable potentially next month
+
+I also installed Debian Bookworm with the same setup on my neighbor's laptop, and will be doing the same for their new-to-them desktop once the remaining components that were missing have arrived
+
+Shifting gears into Apple related stuff, I got the M2 iPad Air when it came out, in blue, along with the Apple Pencil Pro to go along with it
+
+I also got my hands on two (2) black HomePod Minis a few months ago that were on clearance at a big box retailer near where I work for around $50 USD each
+
+And they work rather nicely as stereo speakers for the Apple TV 4K (with ethernet) that I ordered new off the Apple Store app
+
+## Are You Done Yet?
+
+I suppose so
+
+Well anyways, with the [recent redoing of how I craft my website](/blog/2025/06/static-site-generators), I should be doing more blog posts now, whenever I can think of something that I wanna write about, since all I gotta do now is write the Markdown for them and have my WebGen script take care of the rest for me
+
+Here's a fun fact before I sign off, <a href="https://www.kate-editor.org" target="_blank">Kate</a> has a spell check toggle that I didn't know about, which means I can use my favorite text editor to write these blog posts while still catching any incorrect spellings I might make along the way!

_markdown/blog/2025/06/static_site_generators.md

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+---
+title: Static Site Generators
+template: blog
+page_dir: /blog/2025/06/static-site-generators
+---
+
+# Static Site Generators
+
+You've likely heard of static site generators before, there certainly seems to be no shortage of them
+
+Just to name a few off the top of my head, there's <a href="https://www.gohugo.io/" target="_blank">Hugo</a>, <a href="https://www.jekyllrb.com/" target="_blank">Jekyll</a>, and <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/" target="_blank">11ty</a>
+
+I personally have never found static site generators appealing, primarily because I didn't want to be constrained to what themes were available to them, nor did I want to have to craft my website around how a given static site generator functioned
+
+I also am "one of those" types of people that like to remove as many layers of abstraction as I can from what I am doing, and get down into the nitty gritty of things, partially because I want to know how they work, partially because I want to not be reliant on a layer of abstraction that hides what's going on under the hood from me
+
+That said, at least for the ones that you generate from Markdown files, I can see the appeal, since Markdown is easy to write, meaning you can, say, publish blog posts more often and more easily, compared to having to write out all the HTML each time you want to make a new one (even if you have an HTML file saved somewhere that has most of what's needed in it already, ya still have to write the new HTML in there)
+
+I personally like writing out the HTML, it allows me to fine-craft my site to be exactly how I like it, although it can be rather time consuming to do, even for something so simple as writing a blog post or something (which I totally do on the regular...)
+
+## Where I Was
+
+So the most recent version of my website (as of late June 2025) was completely hand-crafted in HTML and CSS
+
+I wrote everything in raw HTML, from the initial page where ya click the power button on the monitor to get into the site proper, to any blog posts I had written, which while fun, honestly did make it a slight chore when I wanted to make a new page, or write a new blog post (same difference for all intents and purposes)
+
+## What I Used to Do
+
+Before the most recent (again, at the time of writing) redesign of my website, I made a nice little Bash script I called WebGen
+
+It's a wrapper for a program called <a href="https://www.pandoc.org/" target="_blank">Pandoc</a>, which can take multiple kinds of document files (i.e. Markdown) as input, and convert them into multiple other kinds of document files (i.e. HTML) as output
+
+Pandoc also has the ability to use 'template' files for the output, allowing, say, an HTML file to be used as a template that the content of, say, a Markdown file, can be slapped into at a specific place in the HTML
+
+So my little WebGen script would scour a directory for Markdown files, convert them into HTML, put the converted HTML into the designated spot in the template HTML file, and output that to an HTML file where specified by the Markdown file
+
+Twas pretty simple
+
+## What I'm doing now
+
+After doing the whole "I'm gonna write everything on this website from complete scratch" thing for a while, I decided I'd take a look at that old WebGen script of mine again
+
+I modified it to source a config file that houses where the root directory of the website is, where the Markdown files are kept, and where the template HTML files are located
+
+The Markdown files now contain the title of the page (which Pandoc puts in the final output HTML), the name of the template HTML file to use, and the location of the new page relative to the web root
+
+So the script crawls the directory of Markdown files, one-by-one parses the location and template from each Markdown file, and does the aforementioned stuff, and bang, web pages!
+
+## Long Story Short
+
+I cleaned up WebGen, made some new template HTML files from the two main page styles of my website, and am using it again for non-bespoke pages on my website, especially blog posts
+
+## If I Wanna Use This Thing of Yours Myself, Where Can I Get it?
+
+I'll have it up on my Gitea whenever I get around to spinning up a new instance of it, and I'll update this here post when I do
+
+I also plan on rewriting WebGen in Python so that people on OSes besides Linux can make use of it if they so wish