I can see you're offering self-contained prebuilt single-file binary releases. From my perspective those are a fine way to address the user request of "I want it to be easy to install without needing to first install and configure n other tools". That's one thing that I reckon hugo got right.
Out of curiosity I downloaded a linux binary md2blog release, and apart from needing to unzip and `chmod +x` it, it ran fine without dependencies -- i don't have any tooling related to deno or typescript installed locally.
Are you using `deno compile` [1] to build these self-contained release binaries?
Why not both? It doesn't need to be mutually exclusive; write md2blog.html so it can run either from the command-line or be opened in the browser—whichever is preferable (easiest) at the time.
I don't understand your comment about durable storage. If you have a directory of Markdown files on your disk, that's already durable storage. I'm just talking about tweaking the development approach so the site generator's business logic can run using the browser process's JS runtime that's almost definitely already in memory. md2blog.html would be written to accept the same directory that the current incarnation reads; use ordinary file APIs—the input element or drag and drop. "Web app data" (I think you're talking about localStorage?) would only seem to come in after starting to expand the scope of the tool and is a separate matter.
On the other hand, if I wanted to ship something similar with a built-in editing experience, then I think running it in the browser would be the way to go. The problem I saw there (last time I checked) was that I couldn't write directories of files to the file system from a web page (and I definitely want to store everything in the file system).
You mean to an arbitrary path—why would this be necessary? The only write operation that most static site generators make use of is putting exactly one file tree somewhere after processing the input. The same thing is achieved by the browser's native Save File handling. If it were running in the browser, you'd generate a ZIP containing that file tree.
I do like the idea in other contexts, just not here.
> To build and test the site locally (with automatic reloading), run:
> md2blog --clean --serve
> And open a browser to the "localhost" URL that is written to the console. You can kill the server with Ctrl+C.
as described in https://jaredkrinke.github.io/md2blog/quick-start.html
> Perhaps your use case is already supported in a different way
It wasn't a support request.
My workflow is that I write my posts in VS Code, and then if I want to preview or upload, I just hop over to the console and type a command (no mouse needed). Deno's built-in sand boxing is the most convenient command line alternative to browser-based apps that I'm aware of.
Edit to add: I have toyed with the idea of integrating VS Code's Monaco editor into a "dev blog in your browser" type of app, but (the last time I checked) durable storage for web app data wasn't reliable (it was more intended to be a cache). Maybe things have changed.