Fri, 2 Aug 2024
A new Ruby-based static-site generator from Shinobi creator Bradley Taunt

I wasn't expecting a new static-site generator from Bradley Taunt, who created Shinobi, but I should have expected it because he has written a lot of short blog-generating scripts, as he details in *Blogging for 7 years* https://btxx.org/posts/seven-years/

He left Shinobi behind a few years ago. I don't begrudge him that -- it remains good to use and will continue to be so. Shibobi has issues for sure -- the biggest being that you can't do any inline links or other HTML because it uses XML for web display.

He wrote PHPetite https://phpetite.btxx.org/ before Shinobi https://shinobi.btxx.org/, and *pblog https://pblog.btxx.org/ and *barf https://barf.btxx.org/after that.

And now we have *wruby https://wruby.btxx.org/about.

I'm interested -- it's Ruby, something I already use, and not shell, which theoretically makes it more portable. I don't think any of Bradley's scripts "played well" in the Windows world unless you were using a Linux/Unix environment within it.

And even though Bradley is a user of OpenBSD, I had to figure out how to modify Shinobi in order to work in a BSD environment. My changes -- https://stevenrosenberg.net/posts/shinobi_on_openbsd.txt -- will allow it to work in OpenBSD, which I tested, and FreeBSD, which I did not; the original script should work fine in NetBSD.

My interest in Bradley's programs remains high because I'm a big fan of blogging, especially with static sites and minimal, understandable software that can be hacked by mortals. That's what drew me to Shinobi.

And now I think it's time for me to try this new site generator.

The rest of Bradley's blog about *wruby lives here: https://wruby.btxx.org/, and his main blog is also using this script: https://btxx.org/

Here is the *wruby repo, which like all of Bradley's projects is on sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~bt/wruby