SiteGen update

RoboKiwi.com/content/blog/2023-03-19-sitegen-alpha.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+title: SiteGen .NET static website generator
+date: 2023-01-29T20:00:00+12:00
+categories:
+- development
+tags:
+- .net
+- jamstack
+- markdown
+- sitegen
+author: David
+description: A new static website generator in .NET
+url: /blog/2023/01/29/sitegen/
+---
+## Overview
+
+I've made a start on a static website generator written in .NET. This website is now built on it.
+
+## Why another static website generator?
+
+While impressively fast, I found the templating features and style of Hugo, and its lack of extensibility made me start looking elsewhere.
+
+Other static website generators tend to lean too heavily into Node, NPM and very opinionated front-end frameworks.
+
+When it comes to templating the site, and in particular dealing with things like hierarchical navigation and table of contents, the former also seemed unwieldy.
+
+I decided to see how fast I could get a pure .NET implementation going first, and if I could port my blog across from Hugo.
+
+Using ASP.NET MVC and Razor templating made it easy to rapidly build out the website, particularly with things like the hierarchy traversal and
+navigation which was tricky to unviable in Hugo. And F5 to debug and iterate is great here.
+
+## What's working so far
+
+- Markdown rendering
+- Front matter support for YAML, TOML and JSON
+- Git integration for author, date and time for creation and modification
+- Generate static resources for Mermaid diagrams to ensure the site is still fully static
+- Syntax highlighting through Pygments
+- Fast, easy generation and traversal of the site hierarchy to generate the site's navigation through patterns 
+  like breadcrumbs, nested navigation, linking to siblings, descendents and ancestors etc
+- Built-in taxonomies including categories and tags
+- Site map generation
+- Generating from **any** source that can provide a site map
+- GH Actions building and deployment for Azure Static WebApps
+
+## Next features
+
+I'm currently working on a few important features:
+
+- Rich pagination
+- Internationalization (i18n) and Localization (l10n) support
+- Outputs to other formats, starting with RSS, Atom, JSON
+- Search engine integration such as Algolia
+- Static comments engine integration
+- Migrating from other site generators and CMSs (e.g. Wordpress, Hugo)
+- Optimization passes