Last year I decided to write more. I thought I’d try a hosted solution because I wanted to concentrate on the writing and not on the fiddling with the site.
Micro.blog was the most attractive solution to me but after using it for a while I realized that, as a developer, I am not capable of leaving the building of my blog to somebody else. There were too many things I wanted to tweak/change, bugs I couldn’t live with etc.
So I ended up sticking with my Hugo solution.
Unfortunately there are many little annoyances when blogging with a static site generator, due to the fact that your posts are a bunch of Markdown files in a folder with a specific file name and some frontmatter boilerplate in them.
Creating a blog post was always tedious. Too many little fiddly things to do before you could just start to write.
In order to remedy this I created a blog-cli that just schaffolds new blog posts for me. It works fine but I really wanted an editor that can do that for me.
That’s why I built Grit. It’s a little Electron app that let’s you manage a folder full of Markdown posts and edit them as well.
It allows you to store the path to your Markdown files, filter through the files, create a new file, edit the file and publish via Git.
I used Preact and htm to write it because I was too lazy to set up a build step and I love writing code the browser can directly interpret. For the file editing part in Grit I am using CodeMirror which is a hell of a product, wow.
If you use Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby or whatever other static site generator to build your blog and are looking for a little convenience there, give it a spin! See the current feature list on GitHub.
It’s an alpha version so there be dragons. But I am planning a bunch of improvements like: drag and drop images, configurable frontmatter and some enhancements around file-creation.
If you want, let me know what you think on Twitter.
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