Over the last 20+ years, I’ve attempted to keep a personal web site going. This has met with mixed success (ok, ok, basically none). Over the years, this blog and web site have evolved from being raw HTML, to a Hugo based static site, to using various hosting options (Google sites, Medium, etc). I’ve also dabled in writing shorter form things on Twitter, LinkedIn, Threads, etc. In the end, all these platform left something to be desired.

As a recent change in my life (cancer diagnosis) has necessitated a few changes in my daily life, I needed a project (like yeah, right) to keep me busy and distracted while I was recovering.

Along with wanting a platform where I could write up my thoughts, I’ve had ideas on how to present some of the content that I’ve not really seen elsewhere. Many of my ideas were sparked by platforms and services that I’ve had the privilege to use during my various work stints. My many years as a Unix Systems Administrator, the time at Twitter, Doordash, and Google, have given me an interesting set of insights. I’m hoping that over time, I’ll be able to make some of these ideas come to fruition here.

In order to be able to do this, I needed my own method of processing and publishing my content. At the same time, I really didn’t want to re-invent everything. Here were some of my wants and wishes:

• Use Markdown to write. There was little reason to re-invent another markup language. Also, using other markup languages was largely discounted as they were less easily writeable.
• Use a custom Markdown processor, or modify an existing one to add some nice to have features, such as:
  • Custom code snippets, I’m hoping to publish some more code snippets, and I have some ideas on how to present them that I’d like to explore.
  • Simple “call outs” to easily be able to write “notes” and “warnings” as part of the content.
• Generate simple, HTML5 output, something I can modify myself… and since I’m a horrible designer, Javascript programmer, and CSS stylist… simple is better.
• Ability to mostly import my miriad of existing content across a number of platforms. While I was not looking to import content “hands free”, minimal editing beyond a cut-n-paste was definitely appreciated.
• Ability to rewrite both my blog posts and other content easily.

My first attempt was to use the awesome Caddy and its built-in support for publishing Markdown files. I’ve known the author of Caddy, Matt Holt, since the days he started the project, and knew that I’d be in good hands if this fit my needs. Unfortunately, the built-in Markdown support was insufficient for my needs. I might have been able to submit a pull request to add the functionality that I was looking for. However, due to some other issues (unrelated to Caddy), I decided to take my inspiration from Caddy and build my own Markdown to HTML converter using the same Markdown parser.

At the current time, I’ve implemented a simple, minimal, CLI to generate and publish a web site into a set of static assets. I use Goldmark with Chroma and a custom extension to process any Markdown files within directory tree to HTML files alongside the Markdown files. A preliminary version of this CLI has been published to github.com/nuttyswiss/ktw. This really needs a better name… suggestions welcome. With this, I can now generate and publish a new version of my blog by doing:

1go run github.com/nuttyswiss/ktw/cmd/web -s ~/work/tepid generate
2go run github.com/nuttyswiss/ktw/cmd/web -s ~/work/tepid publish

A simple YAML config file keeps it all sorted:

1# Config for web CLI (go install github.com/nuttyswiss/web/cli/web@latest)
2site: "tepid.org"
3root: "sftp://host.example.com/home/weingart/htdocs"
4dir: "htdocs"
5templates:
6  - "about.tmpl"
7  - "article.tmpl"
8  - "blog.tmpl"

As alluded to in README#future-work, there is a lot left to do before this resembles any sort of semi-polished piece of work. But, as an MVP for myself, it meets the bar for barely acceptable.