Firn and GitHub Pages
Created: 2021-01-21
So, I rewrote the website. I didn't write for a while, because pandemic and other life circumstances, during which time Sapper broke itself, and I decided that rather than fixing my build, I should re-write the whole thing in a different static site generator.
That static site generator is firn, which is pretty new and shiny. It particularly caught my eye because it uses all the skills I use at work:
Clojure
hiccup for templating the pages,
Org mode for the words, and it plays nicely with org-roam (more on that later)
(and a bit of CSS)
Although firn is new, Clojure projects tend to be spectacularly stable, so I fully expect this not to break catastrophically if I leave it alone for a bit, and if it does break, I know the language and ecosystem well enough to have some hope of fixing it. I know just about enough JavaScript to be dangerous, and don't particularly enjoy it, so even if the new firn site does break, that's more fun.
There's a very tiny bit of JavaScript - Prism for doing code syntax highlighting, but this is not code I ever intend to touch. I'm using a slightly modified version of the Material Dark theme with it.
Deployment
I've also moved from GitLab to GitHub, mostly because I did the same in my job. This means new deployment scripts and a new URL. The documentation around GitHub pages is pretty good if you just want to do a Jekyll site, but less so if you want to go off the beaten track. Thankfully, I found someone else who has been building with firn and borrowed their configuration (from this repo). This works really nicely (and really fast!) if...
you remember to tell GitHub to serve pages from the
gh-pagesbranch, because this is what theactions-gh-pagesthing doesyou haven't been "clever" and put your image assets in git lfs, because then GitHub tries to serve up the reference file rather than the image asset (see this issue).
This is all open source, so feel free to go look at my workflow configuration and tell me how to do it better.