Feb 07, 2025 · Amisi Kiarie
The function of typographic design is to help the reader understand the author's ideas. For a document to be easy to read, its visual structure must reflect its logical structure. [...] As you are writing your document, you should be concerned with its logical structure, not its visual appearance. The LaTeX approach to typesetting can therefore be characterised as logical design. [...]
The purpose of writing is to present your ideas to the reader. This should always be your primary concern. It is easy to become so engrossed with form that you neglect content. Good ideas couched in good prose will be read and understood, regardless of how badly the document is formatted. LaTeX was designed to free you from formatting concerns, allowing you to concentrate on writing.
– Lamport, A Document Preparation System.
I want you to try Hyloblog, so I'm very tempted to speak about it as a novel, radical, paradigmatic insight into the essence of writing, software and the mysteries of the human soul. Sorry. It is none of these things.
Hyloblog is instead the exploration of a few ideas we have for simplifying the static site generator (SSG) into a more cohesive tool for blogging like a hacker. In particular, Hyloblog is
Designed for writers, not themers. Its directory structure is free of
folders like assets, layouts, data and includes, so that you don't
need a CLI tool to generate your blog for you:
Writing a post? Make a Markdown file.
Need a category? Make a folder.
There are and will be ways to customise things, but the idea is to treat the source directory like the source code for a program, which can and should be beautiful, and prioritises the needs of its user — for a program, the programmer, for Hyloblog, the writer.
Minimal in metadata. As far as possible, we avoid cluttering source with annotations:
The URL to a page is the path from the root of the source directory, the
title of the page is taken from the first #-level title in the source,
etc.
We presuppose your usage of Git to limit unnecessary features and keep the source tidy:
No draft metadata tag or folder; you have branches for that
Author and timestamp of a post are taken from the Git commit in which it originally appears. You can override this in the metadata for any given post, but the effect is there is usually slightly less stuff in your source.
Small. Just under 2KLOC currently, which will grow, but slowly. It's hackable and approachable.
Thus Hyloblog is an evolution, not a revolution; a work of refinement rather than invention; variation on a common theme, derivation, integration — you get the idea.
Now you may be asking, Why exactly should I care about the 400th SSG to arrive? Permit me to turn the question on its head and instead ask, Why are there so many of these things, in the first place?
Writing, and by extension, the presentation of writing, is a very subjective thing. I mean not that the significance or value of any given piece of writing is subjective, but that the process itself of writing depends very much on the writer in question. Writing is deeply personal, even intimate. You are taking the thoughts of your heart and casting them into a fixed form, with the aim of being understood. So it is plain that no single medium can satisfy all of us: no pen or pencil, no stock of paper, no theme, and indeed, no SSG can possibly answer to the diverse and sundry needs and tastes that we each have.
Hyloblog, then, is the SSG that answers to our tastes. We like the Unix philosophy, C, Vim and things like these. If your tastes are different, then don't sweat it: we're all wrong at times — I mean, um, see the link above and remember that in matters like this, no one is right and no one is wrong, or something.
That's all for today. See the homepage for more information on Hyloblog or catch us on Discord.
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