Clojurians Log v2
practicalli
Practicalli books and websites are generated using https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/, a project built on top of MkDocs. This has provided plugin's and themes to create a highly engaging way to structure content. Unfortunately MkDocs version 2 has been rewritten and introduced many breaking changes, so my current sites will not build on this new version. The MkDocs project seems to be less open than before and there is no support for the community plugins that made MkDocs so useful (maybe that will change back in future) This year I've decided to migrate all Practicalli content to Zensical, a new project by the makers of Material for MkDocs. Zensical is written in Rust & Python and is really fast. This year should see feature parity between the two projects. It is an opportunity to have a complete overhaul of each Practicalli book and ensure al the content is up to date and relevant (for new and experienced Clojure developers). This is a big task, but should also identify if there are any gaps to fill. Using Zensical the websites will be faster to search, load pages faster & use less resources. The authoring feedback workflow will be significantly faster too. I will start with Neovim & Spacemacs websites and then work through Clojure, Clojure Web Services and ClojureScript books.
What's your guess on the longevity of Zensical? Since they are making the whole platform now, do you think think are in it for the long haul?
I've been thinking about this space lately. The Clojure website is in asciidoctor format. It's not amazing, but is getting the job done for now. I hit all kinds of limitations when I was publishing the survey writeup. I've been looking for some other options to try, on my own at least.
I am confident Zensical will be around for the long term. There is a long history of Material for MkDocs project, which is coming to and end because of technical challenges of the underlying MkDocs project (including significant breaking changes in version 2 and reduced community openness). Zensical being a rewrite of MkDocs as well as the Material theme removes the technical constraints previously experienced. Zensical is usable now for Practicalli book websites. The blog feature will be added later in the year. The second half of the year should see Zensical equal and then surpass the Material for MkDocs project.
I'll check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
I suggest using Zensical to create a refactored design of http://clojure.org (or use Zensical as a fast way to iterate through different design ideas without needing to touch the existing http://clojure.org site). I would be interested in collaborating on a refactored http://clojure.org website. https://github.com/practicalli/cycling is a new Practicalli site created with zensical. I use uv to install zensical as a tool and a github workflow to deploy to GitHub pages.
I'll take a look.
I appreciate the offer to collaborate. I’m not ready to take on http://clojure.org just yet, but I’d like to try some static site tools for sure.