Introducing Mies
When getting ready to set up this blog, I looked around at blog software and sites, but didn't find one I liked. So I made my own, as one does. 😎
This site runs on Mies, a minimalist static blog engine, developed with the principle that less is more. Mies takes pages written as markdown files, and converts them into a static blog, which can be uploaded to any web host (or github or various cloud providers). No pain, no fuss.
Mies accomplishes this by standing on the shoulders of two specific giants:
- Markdig markdown engine to convert .md files into HTML
- RazorLight engine which lets the user embed arbitrary C# code in their HTML, so that pages can be modded and defined almost entirely via templates, without changing the executable
The result is a powerful and efficient website engine that takes input files written as markdown, and produces a complete website, which in turn can be uploaded to any kind of a web host. Mies further simplifies the job by providing a default template for making a blog, but the templating engine is powerful enough to support other kinds of static sites as well.
Besides speed, Mies is also a reaction to WordPress-style maximalism. Web UIs are great, but they carry an ongoing cost: having a WP blog requires you to run a web server running PHP, a MySQL database, and an anti-spam service subscription just as a cover fee, plus ongoing patches to all of the above - or paying someone else to do all that. And I will admit, there was a time when doing all that was new and exciting, back when Web 2.0 and database backed websites were a groovy new thing. But in the year of our lord 2020 none of this stuff is amusing anymore. There has to be a better way.
And I think there is.
Anyway - I'm going to open-source it soon. Mies is written in C# running on .NET Core 3.1, so it should be completely cross-platform, and I'm hoping others will help me test that assumption. 😁