I have had some kind of web presence since 1994. There has been no much useful content but usually I have just wanted to try out web things out of curiosity.
My last stint on HTML/CSS before today was somewhere around 2010-2012. Since that I have had one more stint on Javascript full stack development (node.js & al.) in 2017 but I still didn't liked it as Javascript the language was still full of traps for the unwary and the whole ecosystem was very confusing and changing all the time (YMMV).
I have been looking for a static website generator for some time. In general the concept of static website generator is very nice and just what I'm looking for but when I had a closer look I felt the defaults you get from out-of-the-box where not so good fit for my use case. I have no motivation to study the details of a generator and how I could tailor it to my needs as the main driver for me here is not the content but "how the things work".
However recently when I have been reading internet I found a nice CSS styles: system.css and latex-css that both pleases my (old) eyes. I already knew one can use XSLT to convert one kind of HTML to other kind of HTML. Because I too like to write my notes in Markdown I just started to wonder there has to be a Markdown to HTML conversion utility. In 15 secods with a single Google query I found Showdown.js. At that point I realised I have all the building blocks to create by own static website generator!
I'm a big fan of XSLT and Saxon and I have now found a perfect scenario try Saxon. So soon the software stack settled to:
Which I know all but Showdown.js rather well. That served me well for my notes site. Later when I wrote this blog I also added Graphviz so I could add the following diagram:
Because my hosting provider uses Apache HTTP Server I simply use the directory index feature on the site top level. There's an excellent directory index tuning guide here.
All the tooling presented in this article is part of my Ansible based hobby computer setup.