A couple of years ago, I decided it was time to return to the internet and establish a virtual presence. Having been removed from social networks for over a decade at that point, I found the current state of affairs somewhat daunting. I felt overwhelmed by the complexity and, frankly, much of the content I encountered wasn’t to my taste. This was in stark contrast to my personal feed, meticulously curated over the years from a multitude of blogs. Simultaneously, I was trying to organize and give meaning to a vast collection of links, notes, and general content, often in Markdown format, that served me as a kind of external brain. It then dawned on me that I could hack my way back online by establishing a blog as a central hub for my content and sharing to social media from there; the content would come from this second brain and, as a bonus, this approach would compel me to organize this notes dump, potentially making this mass of notes useful to both myself and others.
With this goal in mind, I set out to investigate the best and most painless way to set up such a blog. After exploring existing solutions, I decided to build my own, first writing tentative scripts in Python, which quickly became unmaintainable. This situation called for a more robust solution, and I initially spent some time developing one in Rust. However, switching to Go significantly sped up the process, and here it is: the first, more or less stable, version of DSBG. I believe it boasts a good initial feature set, including RSS feed generation, automatic share buttons, themes, and more, making it completely usable (at least for my own use case).
Because I believe DSBG could be useful to others in similar situations, I’m releasing it under an MIT license, primarily to gather feedback and solicit help from the community for its further development. This very blog was generated using DSBG. DSBG is available at github.com/tesserato/dsbg.
Show HN: DSBG - A Static Site Generator that Fast-tracks Your Digital Presence
The ethos behind it is to automate your virtual presence as much as possible, while retaining control over the created content. To that end, the following features are available:
Easy installation;
Support for Markdown & HTML source files;
Automatic tag generation from paths ;
built-in tag filtering;
Client-side fuzzy search over all content;
Automatic RSS feed generation;
Watch mode with automatic rebuild for continuous feedback;
3 different themes, with the ability to add your own via custom CSS;
Automatic share buttons for major social networks;
Easy to extend with analytics, comments, and more.
A couple of years ago, when I decided to re-engage with social networks, I felt completely lost in the modern internet landscape. Social media felt overwhelming, and I missed the curated, thoughtful spaces of the “old internet.” I also had a massive collection of notes and links (my “second brain”) that was becoming unmanageable.
So, I decided to build my way back online with a tool to transform those files as easily as possible into something meaningful and visually appealing. The result is DSBG (Dead Simple Blog Generator). It started as Python scripts, evolved to Rust, and finally landed in Go for speed and simplicity.
DSBG is designed to be your central online hub. It lets you:
go install - setup is incredibly easy.I believe DSBG can help others who feel overwhelmed and want to build a meaningful online presence painlessly. It’s MIT-licensed, and I’m actively seeking feedback, feature requests, and contributors to make it even better.