Some tools to make your static site even better!

Static sites are pretty cool for a simple blog. I have collected some tools and practices over the years to make my life a little bit easier.

The tools

Some of the tools I use for making this static site.

• jekyll - The static site generator of my choice at this time, it’s tiny and does the job quite well. I’m using rouge for the markup of the text.
• github pages - To host the site. It’s simple and it works.
• typora - To actually type this fancy content. A full-fledged markdown editor that I kinda like for its simplicity, plugins, and beautiful outline.
• prettier - To format the markdown in a sensible way.
• imageoptim - To make all the images a tad smaller. So you don’t accidentally upload a 15 megabyte GIF.
• htmlproofer - For checking the links and the open graph tags. Sometimes your links go to black holes, this prevents that.
• aspell - A spell checker that can deal with markdown. I’m the worst when typing. Somehow I put the letters in the wrong order. I think a part of me just doesn’t care, like this monkey in the back of my brain is like: tss spelling, schelling! People will understand! Who needs punctuation! Spend your brain-cycles on figuring out why bananas are yellow!

Sharecards, or is it share-cards?

One thing you might want to do is to generate cards when people share your blog. You can either do that very fancy, or very lazy. I use a very tiny script that generates an image with wkhtmltoimage in order to generate the cards. I will share that script on GH gists soon.