Generating a multi-language blog based in Markdown
For a long time in my career, writing about programming meant writing in English instead of my mother-language Portuguese. It seems to be the usual way in a profession mainly led by native English speakers. By the way, a large number of programming tools are available in English only, leading non-native English speakers like me to invent Portuglish words that end up looking like Frankensteins.
This kind of anglo-driven behavior started to change when I got introduced to @fernahh. Besides being an excellent professional, he became one of my best friends. In his website, he shares several ideas using the old and gold Portuguese. Reading his blog posts, I asked myself: If I express my thoughts way better in my native language, why the heck I'm not writing in Portuguese?
So in 2019, I started to write my blog posts also in Portuguese. Two discoveries got in front of my eyes ever since. Firstly I discovered I am much more critical of my work when I read it in my mother tongue. The second discovery derives from the first one. I finally realized how bad I write—many thanks to you who read it till here.
After deciding to write posts in Portuguese, I needed to find a tool to make this job easy. I searched for a Static Blog Generator with multi-language support included and ended up before those popular Static Site Generators. They offered mountains of features I wasn't interested in—Themes, Comments, CMS, E-Commerce—and zero features relating to what I needed: delightful support to multi-language. In addition, the two most popular tools in this category are written in Ruby and Go, not in the most beloved programming language in the world, JavaScript.
Facing this situation, I decided to create Triven. If you need a static blog generator based in Markdown with delightful support to multi-language, you are just a couple of commands away from the paradise:
npm install -D @glorious/triven
npx triven build
From now on, you only need to focus on your content. Without writing one single line of code to configure Triven, you get:
✅ A multi-language homepage containing all your posts.
✅ Specific homepage for each language.
✅ Pagination.
✅ Language menu.
✅ A multi-language RSS feed.
✅ Specific RSS feed for each language.
✅ Layout inspired by Hey World.
✅ 2.3kb of CSS.
✅ 0kb of JavaScript.
Another great trait is that Triven easily connects to any existing website. By default, Triven generates all its assets in a directory called triven at the root of your project. However, Triven can output those files to any other place. That is, if you already have a website, you only need to set /blog as the output directory for Triven generated files, and that's it—exactly what I did on my website.
Language menu automatically built by Triven
Finally, if you prefer customize every detail of your blog, no problem. On Triven's repository, you find all the information you need to customize everything you want.