Rewriting the site
I've rewritten the site to make it possible to do a fun few things, and to ease up the maintenance burdon I'd given myself.
How it used to work
My site has had a few forms. You can see some of them on the wayback machine. Early incarnations were just static HTML written by hand, eventually replaced with a toy webserver/templating system doing everything manually in Scheme, and most recently a mishmash of markdown and bash utilising the lowdown* conversion tool.
lowdown - simple markdown translatorAnd now
Now, the site is a mix of plain HTML and slightly less plain Embedded Ruby (ERB). Content is added by creating ERB files in the right place, and there's differentiated handling for these sorts of posts compared with the more interactive content I list at the bottom of the homepage.
Of course, by supporting ERB, I do also have the fun ability to do things on the server side like show you your IP address (18.191.237.228). But that benefit is more something I'd more like to apply to the interactive content (such as COB, ACT II).
The templating system does also help make it possible to properly add navigation. It's not something I'm terribly bothered about, but adding it previously was going to be a bit messy.
I'll probably write more about Ruby, server-side content, templating, etc, at some point. But this post was really just so I had an entry I could look back at.