Page: on the creation of a simple website generator

Here I will detail how this website is hosted. Key for me is simplicity, as such this website is:

• Completely static.
• Written entirely in markdown.
• Hosted on github, automatically deploying using actions.

You can inspect the repository of this website here.

How does it work?

• The website project structure is given as follows:

  ├── Makefile
  ├── content
  │   ├── about.md
  │   ├── contact.md
  │   ├── projects
  │   │   ├── mnist-web
  │   │   └── page
  │   ├── projects.md
  │   └── work.md
  ├── pandoc
  │   ├── defaults.yml
  │   ├── footer.html
  │   ├── header.html
  │   └── template.html
  └── serve.py

• To deploy changes, we simply change the contents of the content directory.

• Then, when we push these changes, github-actions runs the Makefile. This Makefile uses pandoc to convert the markdown files to HTML. I do this such that the directory structure of the content folder is preserved. This simplifies the reasoning required when linking between pages in the website.

• In order to “style” the website, we use the pandoc HTML templating feature to define the CSS, header, and footer of the website.