Colophon

Contents

This website • How it works • My metadata • Infrastructure • Planned features • But why

This page explains the tools that i use to create this site.

in publishing, a colophon is a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book such as an “imprint” (the place of publication, the publisher, and the date of publication).

wiki

This website

has no js
uses handwritten css - ~~based on~~ copied from barf, thank you!
the home page is under 250kb
has no form of hotlinking - no external css,js,font

Check out the source code.

How it works

I take notes in markdown then translate this to static html with the help of:

gnu make - the build system, 200 LoC, compile notes that changed
lowdown - markdown translator
tidy - correct, cleanup and format html files
rsync - upload to the webserver
some unix commands to process metadata (grep, tr, sort, printf)

First I translate the markdown pages to html fragments with lowdown, then I add some inlined html (navigation menu, footer, html header etc.) to the pages with make; I can list multiple markdown parts as prerequisites that should be printed on the same html page.

docs/%.html: docs/%.pre
    $(call html_envelope, $*.html, $^ )

docs/notes.html: docs/notes.pre docs/tags.pre docs/recent.pre

My metadata

As described in the lowdown manual, the syntax follows the MMD speficiation.

title
description
tags
maturity level: from 🌱 to 🌿 to 🌻 - copied from strikingloo.github.io

Infrastructure

The site runs on a Toradex Apalis i.MX6 with Linux 6.6 (mainline) and Debian 12, drawing about 4W. I also use a free tier ARM server in Oracle Cloud for TCP tunneling.

Read more about how I set up my i.mx6 to run Debian.

Planned features

automated check for dead links
generate RSS feed for my notebook
lowdown is a lovely piece of software, but maybe markdown is not for me

But why

Why build another static website generator?

First, I just translated all .html files to .html. Then I wanted a simple tagging system and some generated pages. Step by step I ended up here.

Also I prefer using the least capable tools. It’s even better, if I can fully understand this tool. I want this website to last.

Gnu Make in 202x?

I found Make useful as:

a build system - build pages that has changed
a tool for task automation - publish