I have decided to open up a GitHub sponsor page. Recently I released the Neovim plugin nvim-ts-rainbow2, which has garnered a lot of stars, so I figured I might as well try this sponsor thing. There is also a Monero wallet for those who prefer to forgo the middle-man.
Git is a decentralized version control system, meaning that there is no one superior repository. Every single copy of a Git repository is just as complete as any other. Of course we can pick one particular repository and declare it to be the one source of truth, the “upstream” repository. Usually this upstream repository is then hosted on some server, and if we are interested in openness and collaboration this server is part of a larger web service, called a “forge”. Out of these forges GitHub is perhaps the most popular one. Unfortunately this means if we are interested in contributions we have to make the GitHub repo our upstream and use its web services and web UI for our workflow. At least that is the common wisdom, but it does not have to be that way.
In January 2019 I switched the static site generator for this website from Pelican to a custom one written in GNU Guile. Most (or all?) static site generators out there have an opinion on what a website should be made of. You might have full control over the layout and content of individual pages, but not so much over how the web site itself is composed. Writing my own static site generator freed me from these constraints. Now if I want to have sub-sites and multiple blogs I can do so. However, the custom generator was suffering from the same problem: it had one specific web site composition in mind, it just happened that this time it fit my needs. That is why I have created HSSG: the Hackable Static Site Generator.
There are two types of people: those who make backups and those who will experience a system breakdown. Fortunately I was in the former category, but it was still a very tedious and stressful experience. Every problem is also an opportunity to grow and throw off dead weight, so I used the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and switch my operating system.
In my previous blog post I presented how I had come up with an embedded domain-specific language for creating web pages in my custom static site generator. I also mentioned the concept of “templates” in passing. Of course it was only logical to follow the page DSL up with a custom template DSL to smooth over the code duplication and pattern repetition.
I got bitten by the Lisp bug recently again, and so I decided to clean up an ugly wart in my static site generator which I use for generating the Workshop. The goal was to create an embedded domain-specific language (DSL) for defining web pages.
About a year ago I wrote about the first step in de-Bootstrapping my website, where I made my site layout independent of the Bootstrap CSS framework. I have now finally removed Bootstrap entirely from the website.
The first major step in phasing out the bloat that is Bootstrap from my website is done. None of the layout depends on any Bootstrap classes and markup. Instead, the layout is built from scratch using the new Flexbox and Grid features.
In the process of de-Bootstrapping the workshop I have to replace whole components provided by Bootstrap with my own constructs. The menu bar is one of the larger components I use, it's fairly complex and requires a lot of non-semantic markup to get working. In this blog post I will describe step by step how I built mine, which requires less markup and does not rely on Javascript. You can try the demo to see what we are going for (please resize your window to see the responsiveness).
Over two years already without rewriting the workshop? I have to rectify this, with the greatest rewrite yet! I have abandoned Pelican because I constantly had to adjust things manually after the build process, and even then there were parts of the website that weren't working. This put me off from blogging, since after each post I would have to stitch everything back together by hand. Seeing that no static site generator would be able to meet my needs I decided to instead write my own in Scheme.