💾 Archived View for zvava.org › wiki › website-rewrite2022.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:33:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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created 2022/05/24 modified 2022/08/15 category text
the website infrastructure has undergone two major changes recently, which was needed since the last rewrite[0] was two years ago now and isn't satisfactory anymore
the previous static site generator (ssg) relied on a bastardized version of markdown to store wiki pages and required too much supportting html/css/js and had to go
i have replaced it with the gemtext format borrowed from the gemini[3] project which is much simpler to parse and render, this has *significantly* reduced the size of the templates, the css, and the ssg. as a byproduct i am now also able to host a gemini mirror of the website free from any extra code
i also changed hosts to a vps provider so instead of forcibly re-uploading every file via ftp, i can run a script on the server via ssh to pull the latest version of the github repository, build it, and copy the output to the lighttpd www/ and agate gemini/ folders
i think halving the size of the already small ssg isn't very productive if it relies on node.js, a very heavy javascript engine, to function. now quickjs[5] has been on my radar for a while but i've never had an excuse to use it until now, think of it as the tcc for node
i rewrote the ssg to use quickjs's (much simpler) api and tested until i got it running locally, once it was done i installed qjs on the server, merged into master, and ran the publish script and nothing changed whatsoever*
