Yassgy, release 0.1!

I am proud to announce the release of Yassgy, version 0.1!

I was working on this project for a week now, and after reading back and forth between the Rust official documentation, and community posts regarding Rust, I have finally developed a program that does more than print "Hello World!" on the screen!

Yassgy stands for "Yet Another Static Site Generator". This project was announced by my OSD600 professor, David Humphrey (@humphd on GitHub).

Right now, yassgy is deprived of features. It can do the least necessary to generate static files for a website, but it is much simpler than a Markdown parser.

Usage

Yassgy accepts as input a text file, and will output an HTML file, where it contains the text found in the original file. You may run it like this:

yassgy --input test.txt

Each group of lines found in the text file that are right after each other is considered a paragraph, and yassgy will consider them as such, thus, generating paragraph elements placed in the HTML file.

Also, yassgy accepts a path to a directory, which will be read for several other text files. See the following example command:

yassgy --input files/

Any other file type is ignored. Yassgy can also deep dive into a nested directory if there is any found inside, and keep the original directory hierarchy when outputting the generated files.

Yassgy will output all generated files and directories into a dist directory in the current directory. If there is already a dist directory, yassgy will delete it without warning, so beware!

Future Releases

Yassgy will still be receiving features. There are several other features that I could not implement due to time constraints or because I am not that knowledgeable in Rust.

Some features that I would like to implement are:

• Markdown parser. Adding more formatting options with Markdown would be perfect to make the static site pages more interesting than simple paragraphs.
• Default stylesheet. While the site is functional, it might be considered boring or even ugly using the agent stylesheet from your browser, so I would like to improve the look even for default sites by offering an opt-out default stylesheet.
• Accepting stylesheets. Another interesting feature would be to let the user enter stylesheet link, whether they may be remotely linked or locally linked.

Enhancements

Even though yassgy is written Rust, performance is not given by default. While yassgy is moderately fast, I believe that it can be enhanced to be more efficient both processing and memory wise.

I will research more on this aspect, especially the memory usage aspect (imagine if the input file was around the GBs!), to improve yassgy's performance. I may rewrite some of its implementation, but as long as the behaviour is the same, it shall be fine.

Conclusion

That's pretty much yassgy's introduction to the real world! While it is not the best program in various aspects, I believe this is a big step for a first-timer like me, both in the Open Source world and in the Rust Language world.