Apr 25, 2020 • 1 min read

Goodbye Gatsby, Hello Swift

In my previous article, I wrote about why I moved to Gatsby. Well, that didn't age well. I made yet another switch and moved to a Static Site Generator written in Swift called Publish, by John Sundell.

What went wrong?

Gatsby was great. It did whatever it promised to do. It was more so to do with my inability to keep up with the web ecosystem. Like I mentioned in the previous article, one of the main reasons I decided to moved, was to have full control over my content. Gatsby, being written in JS, I've never really gotten the time to understand the framework completely. For e.g. the Gatsby theme I was using, did allow stand-alone pages. So I had to switch to a different theme. The new theme had issues with showing images and code highlighting. Although, Gatsby had the shadowing feature to customize, I mostly hacked my way through it. This inhererently brought in a lot of resistence to make any sort of customization.

Enter Publish

Around the time when I had made the switch, John Sundell came with a SSG written in Swift. It had all that I needed - it supported theming, plugins and most of all, it was written in swift. It had a DSL to write type-safe HTML too. This was all music to my ears.

I finally decided to make the switch. I wrote my own theme, modified a plugin to show the read time for an article and got it in a decent shape in a matter for 2 days. The DSL to write HTML worked like a charm.

I thoroughly enjoyed building this site from scratch and I'd highly recommend taking a look at Publish.