Ha, I just now realized that I gave off a weird, ominous vibe by
saying farewell to everything Apple and then go off the grid for
the coming eight months. In case you couldn't tell, I am indeed
alive and well. Been happily hacking away on various projects since.
Well, two, to be precise. One that I will chronicle on this super
cool revamped blog, and the other is this super cool revamped blog.
It may not look much (except ravishing, stylish and handsome), but
it was generated using nothing but bash, sed, awk and free range
bytes. So what? Why is this a thing? Well, it's a thing for me,
since I've been dissatisfied with about every blog engine and static
site generator I've laid my hands on to date. They have all somehow
managed to suck the joy out of writing by having a UX that makes me
question everything that is good and true.
So I started thinking about why I was being so hard to please,
and found that I essentially wanted a way of transforming a pile of
text files in a folder into a static site ready to be pushed onto a
web host. Nothing more, nothing less.
And this is the result; a single bash script that can be dropped
into any folder containing text files. At present it will generate
a snazzy index page and render the selected articles from something
almost, but not quite entirely unlike markdown.
Side-note rant: I really feel that markdown has turned into
something almost, but not quite entirely unlike HTML. Sure, you use
what you need, but judging by how some Github-hosted projects
README.md files look like, some have missed the fucking point with
"easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text".
Anyhow, I will publish this little hack along with a few handy
utilities as soon as I get around to cleaning them up.