Oxdown - Static website generator that works for me

I recently wrote my own personal website generator. In the past I already used Chronicle (In Perl!) and Pelican (In python). I definitely wouldn’t have created another project of this kind if it wasn’t an opportunity to use coding LLM agents on a new project. I especially wanted to try Zed with Claude Code integration. So I bootstrapped Oxdown. Contraction of Oxidized (Rust-inside!) and Markdown. It’s fully opinionated. After all, I will be the only user. Anyway there isn’t anything hardcoded about me and a few configuration variables are allowed, so maybe you will like my design decisions and try it.

Three characteristics of this opinionated design:

• All articles sit in a root directory with a YYYY-MM-DD-article-slug/ directory for each article. A index.md markdown file contains the article, a index.json contains optional article metadata, some static files can be stored along.
• The oxdown command only accepts one argument which is the path to a config file where every option is stored. No command line arguments or environment variables can overload the config file, although the config file can be omitted and read from a OXDOWN_CONFIG env var.
• JSON for main config file and metadata. Not always a good option for humans (especially the inability to add comments), but it’s clean and simple.

This program is now in charge of publishing my articles on tmartin.fr, alongside Medium.