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colophon

this iteration is my first attempt at sharing ideas in this manner. i spent a

lot of time thinking about how i could plan for longevity while also keeping

the writing process simple. in the [merveilles]

community, writing your own static site generator is something of a rite of

passage. and while it is fun to some, and can be a fun little challenge, it

represents a deeper idea about building tools that work exactly in the way the

user needs them to work. i considered using a variety of different tools to do

this, but none exactly met my need. in the end, it made more sense to write my

own.

the major requirements for this [memex]/wiki were:

- plain text is the primary (on disk format)

- minimal markup outside of markdown

- easily templated

- customizable, going forward, if i want things to change

the plain text is the most important. if later, i want to try to use some other

system, i don't have to import or export any files out of different formats. a

few times i have started working with systems to later find that exporting or

extracting the information i had addedd was considerably more difficult than i

expected. or when it was exported, it wasn't in a very usable format.

the content of this memex itself is in a pretty raw form. you can see the

source code of this memex [on sourcehut]. you

could even use the same tool to write your own if you wanted.

i wrote the first version of the generator in [nim] but later

rewrote it in rust as a way to learn a little more of the language - just for

fun. along the way, i also added a gemtext generator for those that perfer to

use the [gemini]>) protocol -

see the site at gemini://metasyn.pw using a [gemini client].

over time, i also worked on trying to reduce the size of the site and improve

the accessibilty. later i added images, which are by far the biggest impact to

performance. if you have suggestions on accessibility, i would be open to

[contact].

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