Nicolino

A performant, tiny, SSG (yeah, sure)

Features

• Markdown-based content - Write in markdown, get HTML
• Posts and pages - Blog posts with RSS feeds and static pages
• Taxonomies - Tags, categories, and custom classification systems
• Image galleries - Automatic thumbnails with lightbox
• Books - mdbook/gitbook-style documentation with hierarchical chapters, sidebar TOC, and navigation
• Search - Site search functionality
• Sitemap - Automatic XML sitemap generation
• Fast builds - Parallel, incremental builds via Croupier task system

WARNING

This is a toy. Do not use this for anything important. Yet, maybe.

What is it tho

It's a SSG, a Static Site Generator. You know, those things where you write some markdown and end up with a website.

Why

Because I am learning Crystal and I know a lot about SSGs, so it's a nice project.

Will it be any good

Probably not? I am an old guy and my energy is limited and I don't need this, so I will just keep adding stuff while it's fun.

What's planned

Nothing is planned, this is strictly a make it up as you go operation. BUT check out the TODO list

More information

You can consider it a "demo" at https://nicolino.ralsina.me

Building for Release (Static Binaries)

The project uses libvips for fast image processing, but libvips cannot be statically linked. To create static binaries, we use the -Dnovips flag which falls back to crimage (a pure-Crystal image library).

Important trade-offs:

• Non-release builds with crimage are very slow - image processing will take noticeably longer
• Release builds with crimage are somewhat faster - but still slower than libvips
• Static builds require -Dnovips - otherwise linking will fail due to missing libvips static libraries

For development use, build without -Dnovips for fast image processing with libvips. For release/static builds, use -Dnovips and accept the performance trade-off.