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Static Site Generator Configuration

Zola is a decent static site generator written in Rust. This post will list some of my impressions and settings I made to get it customized to my liking to emulate the look and feel of my previous blog design.

Generating a new project

After using the init command, empty folders are generated, but it isn't quite clear on what needs to be modified. Running the server on the newly generated project yields a welcome page, but the physical page is not to be found in any folder. To get started quickly, I recommend that you use a theme and then customize it to your needs.

Common Help Information

All NPM and Github repos have README.md as the primary means of communicating the purpose of a specific module or project. In some situations, such as a CLI module, there is almost always a command to list help for the module’s use.

Handle Situation When File Does Not Exist in Directory

Performing a file reading operation to check whether a file exists before operating might cause a race condition as stated in the Nodejs section on fs.stat:

Identify Streams Better when Logging Two or More Streams at a Time

Rxjs provides a means of performing a ‘side effect’ without modifying the observable through the observable chain. The ‘do’ command is good candidate for use when there is a need to log out information when specific operations are performed.

Babel - Requiring ES2015 File from ES5

In the situation where you desire to use a ES5 file to refer to a ES2015 file, the on-the-fly compilation option of Babel can be one of the ways to do so.

This case might come up when you are intending to run an init file that you do not want to perform any Babel compilation, but you still want the ES5 file to serve as the entry point for your module.

Process Exit and Time Elapse

When performing a long-running operation in the terminal, such as file generation, a user would like to know how long the task has run.

For your heavy-duty JavaScript animations, I recommend Velocityjs since it has many features and great documentation.
Here are some simple effects that I find useful if you have chosen to use Velocityjs: