New year, less dependencies! A few months ago, I remade my site in a home-grown static site generator. Part of the reason was to pull away from vendors and providers. I think before this I was doing my site in Notion, all the way on the other end of vendor usage.
In my last post I mentioned slowly bringing my dependency list down to zero, like a sort of programming bonsai project. And I’ve done some of it!
Here’s my Cargo.toml before:
anyhow = "1.0.71" chrono = "0.4.26" gray_matter = "0.2.6" highlight-pulldown = "0.2.2" maud = "0.25.0" pulldown-cmark = "0.9.3" rss = { version = "2.0.4", features = ["chrono", "validation"] } serde = "1.0.171" syntect = "5.0.0" zip = "0.6.6" zip-extensions = "0.6.1"
And here it is after!
highlight-pulldown = "0.2.2" maud = "0.25.0" pulldown-cmark = "0.9.3" zip = "0.5.13" zip-extensions = "0.6.1"
That’s pretty good! Here’s what I got rid of:
rss: RSS spec is actually really simple, and I already have an HTML templater inmaudthat I can make it with. No problem.gray_matter/serde: Not as easy, but replacing this with a mega strict parser for the exact YAML format I use for frontmatter was doable.chrono: I was only using this for the post dates, which is exclusively year-month-day, no timezones or days of the month, all the unpleasant stuff date-time libraries handle for us. Didn’t need much parsing.anyhow: Just for error handling. Wrote my own errors. Not a problem.
The stuff that’s left over will be a lot more involved. A markdown parser, an HTML templating macro, ZIP file implementation, a syntax highlighter? No idea if I can do some of these, but there’s no rush. I can trim my little bonsai tree at my own pace.