Hello, world.

I’m tired of not having a place of my own to put things I write, so I made one. It’s a bit of a hack and mostly looks like how I was maintaining corporate websites 15+ years ago, but whatever. It works, and it’s sort of fun to put together. All pages are static, generated via mk (and cron, in case I forget after an edit).

Right now, things aren’t dated, which is sort of a problem. The order of things in the index is also based on modification time of the entries, which isn’t really great in the face of future edits. I think I know how to fix that, but it’ll take a tiny bit more mechanics.

Hackish though it is, the system does have a few neat proerties. Its main selling point is that it’s super simple. It uses existing system utilities for everything (with the exception of a stand-alone, 3rd-party Markdown parser), and is mostly clever use of mk(1). Static generation has its upsides, too, although nothing I’m doing here is near demanding enough that dynamic generation would be a problem. It handles Markdown, HTML, and plain text, generating a whole page by adding a header and a footer. Given an interpreter for any other text parser (Textile, for example), adding support for that is just a question of adding a rule to the mkfile. Maybe I’ll do one for troff. ☺ Also, this is an entirely subjective thing, but I like the fact that the URLs don’t end in “.html” or whatever, but you can get the source for an article by adding the extension (I should add a link so you don’t have to guess).

The names “index”, “log”, “summary” and anything starting with an underscore are reserved; other than that, use any unicode names you like. I may constrain this further soon—I’m thinking it might be nice to break up the index into chunks eventually.