(2024-03-08) The Text And The Code Go Hand In Hand

Ashivom Bandaralum: The text and the code go hand in hand. Sometimes I hear of “opinionated” software... What happens if the software turns out to be something the author of a site wrote for themselves? It’s more than opinionated. It’s personal.

This website presents a number of sites and the tools they use to create and update them.

*In the private world, public code is polished in order to reflect well on programmers and their abilities.

But night software is not like that. It’s not written for the day job. It’s not written to see the light of day at all.*

And yet, this software offers the unique chance of being the kernel of convivial software: a tool that we can not only learn how to use but that we can disassemble and reassemble

It is possible because the tools are small.

Adam Sjøgren () uses a blog system administered via NNTP written in Haskell. Blogs map to newsgroups, blog posts map to articles, blog comments to followups, and putting in pictures and formatting is done through MIME attachments and Markdown

Alex Schroeder (@alex) uses Oddmu, a wiki engine he wrote to replace Oddmuse, which he wrote to replace wiki.el. Oddmu was supposed to be small and focused on Markdown files in order to be as portable and replaceable as possible

Bill Mill (@llimllib) uses Python to turn Obsidian notes into a website

Brandon (@be_far) uses Quartz to generate the site from custom Typescript components and Obsidian-flavored Markdown

Brennen (@brennen) wrote a Perl module, a Makefile and a few shell scripts to generate his site.

Alexander Cobleigh (@cblgh) wrote a static site generator in Go. It operates on folders of Markdown files and a syntax of commands, written in plaintext files, performing operations that in the end convert the input files into html pages cross-referencing each other

Feoh (@feoh) uses Nikola to generate his blog. Nikola is a beautiful static site generator written in easy to extend Python with a clean plugin architecture

Chris Siebenmann (@cks) runs a wiki written in Python (including a long-running blog) that uses the Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

Gabriel Schneider (@gbrls) runs a site with a mix of Python, Elixir and Bash. Sources are available. I use Obsidian and Vim for writing my notes, Dropbox for syncing

Zach Manson (@pavo) uses a Python script to turn Obsidian notes into HTML pages for a personal wiki.

Timur Ismagilov (@bouncepaw) wrote Mycorrhiza, a wiki engine written in Go. Source files for the wiki are available in a repository. At some point I noticed that Mycorrhiza, the wiki engine, is not good for collecting links, so I made a separate tool called Betula for a separate bookmarking website. I am currently adding Fediverse capabilities to it.