Desloppifying the website

This page is a Draft!

I recently had another stint with generating code using language models.

Every 6 months or so, I try using these tools for something serious. You may wonder, "if it never works, why do you keep trying it?". I'll have to get back to you on that one.

So this time I decided to knock something off the to-do list, turning my static site dynamic, something I had been meaning to do for a painfully long time.

And I love it, its beautiful, and it has made writing pages like the one you're on so much easier in 100 tiny ways. I didn't have to start this page by writing

Desloppifying the website
---
title: Desloppifying the website
permalink: desloppifying-the-website/
---

Why didn't I automate the <title> and permalink years ago? Because the site used to be statically generated by a tool called Jekyll. It's the static site generator that the code platform run by Microsoft's AI division happens to use, which is where this site started. I won't disparage Jekyll, because I was not using it how it was intended to be used at all - But I did not find a good time in getting it to do the kinds of things I wanted it to do.

So I set out to rewrite the site myself to be dynamic. I set up my VPS, I moved all the site content there, and I started serving the HTML with a little Ring app (in Clojure!). And then I never really got around to the whole rewriting part :p

And then at some point I bought a month of one of those language models to try it out, and the site got rewritten with a bunch of new stuff. And now I'm here, having given $25 to something I would tell you I don't support, and with a website that I don't even want to share.

I have this beautiful new git frontend, and I can't even show the code that makes it!

So I figure I should change that, and go the complete other way around. Rewrite the whole site, put it at website.git, and document the whole process. Hopefully by the end, I will have found happiness.

Setup

The site's written in Clojure

I write markdown, you see HTML, so something has to turn the former into the latter.

As the server is running, these markdown files get updated, and new HTML needs to be served as that happens. The problem is that you visit https://grahp.dev, and somehow that needs to serve the Home.md page. So an index must be built, which, well, is what you're supposed to do anyway ._.

Normalization

I think things like what a git repo frontend page is, syntax highlighting, special things like the back button or whatnot, these should be turned into easier to parse structure.

I think I'll try to fix these on the current version of the site as I find them, so that I don't have to re-implement the weird quirks that are left over from the Jekyll days and then fix them after this version of the site is live.