Docusoaring

Docusaurus

Docusaurus is a way to easily build and deploy your own websites developed by facebook originally for the purpose of creating easy to customize documentation sites.

Since the purpose of the Docusaurus website and our Simple Static Site Generators are similar our task as a class this week was to find something we like in Docusaurus and to steal it, or begin to at least.

Our first task was actually to set-up and deploy a docusaurus website. To set up a Docusaurus website is not difficult, you just have to change a few configuration variables and you can deploy the baseline "tutorial" website to gitpages with a simple CLI command. To actually add to, customize and build out a docusaurus page can be a bit more time consuming but it's a far cry from creating your own website, this is a great way to start from an already built out template and to speed up the process of getting information up on the web.
I did so here: Defaultosaurus.

One of the things that immediately stands out about Docusaurus is this pretty single page concept for the design and I wanted it. So as a first step in that direction I abandoned my previous implementation of having an index page that would redirect to my generated markdown and html files and instead I built out a navbar that would always stick to the left side of my website.

It's not as pretty as docusaurus's and it is not collapsible yet, it's a very simple list of buttons that will send you to the selected generated page.

The issue that I filed for this:Replace index w navbar
The commit:7435a0

Thinking ahead

In the future I hope to find a way to stop the page from reloading whenever a link is clicked, I remember React and Angular made this easy but I am not sure how to make my current Python generating HTML implementation as seamless as my previous framework based projects. We will see if this is something I can achieve.

More concretely I have a few ideas for improvements in the future underneath my issues tab on github. I want to take a look at replacing the markdown implementation I currently have with a pre-existing popular library for Python programs so that I can get full markdown support and I also want to build out the navbar to be perhaps be able to include elements that are not generated, maybe some custom links leading to external pages or something, I don't quite know yet.

I will continue to consider what I would like to add to the website and put up issues because maybe someone will come along and pick them up.