I’ve spent the last week rewriting the static website generator for vittorioromeo.com from scratch.

Why?

The previous one had several limitations that couldn’t be easily fixed due to poor design:

• No single page generation for posts.

  • No permalinking, no comments.

• No automatic pagination.

• Many things (like page output files) had to be specified manually.

  • No hierarchical website structure.

The new generator fixes all the aforementioned issues and also adds some cool features, such as post tagging and long post truncation. In terms of implementation, the dependencies are (currently) unchanged:

• My own JSON library is being used to parse JSON metadata.

• My own templating system is being used to expand HTML templates from JSON metadata and Markdown sources.

• My own filesystem library is being used to “understand” the website’s hierarchical structure and to load content data and metadata.

The dependencies listed above are part of my SSVUtils general purpose C++14 library, which is quite old and not currently being worked on (except for bugfixes and minor additions).

My future plans consist in replacing them with more modern and more widespread alternatives (e.g. boostache and the filesystem TS).

Content generation from JSON metadata has been improved significantly. The main idea is that JSON files contain an "expand" object with key-value pairs, where the keys are matched in the templating system and replaced with the values. The expansion is now recursive, allowing templates to generate complex nested hierarchies via nested JSON objects/arrays.

In addition, if one of the values inside an "expand" object ends with the .md extension, the value will be handled as a path: the file in that location will be read and sent to Pandoc, which will produce HTML with Pygments-like syntax highlighting, MathJax mathematical expressions, and many other more cool features.

Here are some examples:

#include <iostream>

// random c++ code
int main()
{
    int x;
    constexpr std::size_t y;
}

void f(int, float) noexcept;

\(100 + \frac{24}{25} - \theta\)

\(f(x)=\sum_{n=0}^\infty\frac{f^{(n)}(a)}{n!}(x-a)^n\)

The generator is still experimental and not yet finished. The source code is available here but currently is an horribly hacked-together mess. I will work on making it nicer in the future.

I am planning to start writing and sharing small articles/tutorials on here, now that I can permalink stuff!