Kethel/2: A high level overview of a low-level SSG

I've been meaning to rewrite my old elixir-based SSG for a newer, and easier to set up alternative. So, what language is the most portable, has universal support across linux distributions? ISO/IEC 9899:1999, or The C Programming Language - of course!

a small note of advice

Kethel isn't perfect by any means; it sometimes just writes garbled data to the output HTML document if a template or TSV ends with a newline, is probably vulnerable to several buffer overflow attacks, as no bounds checking is implemented at all, treats HTML as plain text, with only a "parser" which breaks if you change any nearly any formatting in the templates. And yet, it still works!
So, I'd like to explain some design decisions behind Kethel/2, for fun and to break-even on the time spent on this.

aggregate, and my "solution" to index page generation

Aggregate was the 2nd program I wrote for my site, which fills the spot of a 'compiler', if we're following the compiler/linker metaphor. The RSS feed generation for my site before was really iffy (RFC822 and RFC2822 are to blame). I could have switched to atom feeds instead of RSS in the original kethel, but I had better things to do with my time then refactor all my elixir code. (This isn't an issue with elixir per se, but moreso that I didnt really wanna debug my elixir, wrote as my first and only elixir project)

The general idea with aggregate is that you provide a TSV file, with some free-form data, and aggregate could transform that into an index page, but also an Atom <entry>, with proper tag uri support. Coming back to the first sentence about the 'compiler' metaphor, aggregate does not generate the final html, but only 'preprocesses' the templates and generates a mkpage-compatible 'object page'. Since I've only used C in this project, I already had an obj folder for intermediate output, so it was easy to just generate all the indexes, and various feed entries, and use mkpage as a sort of ersatz-linker, to generate the final XML/HTML.

So, what is this mkpage all about then?

Mkpage is the original program that orchestrated all HTML generation, inspired by PHP's "it's just html!" approach, and my code editor's unwillingness to let me use unclosed tags in my template html files. I chose to use simple HTML comments with some meaning, which I then decode in C. Originally an experiment to only generate my homepage, it's been able to generate a lot of my pages relatively quickly.

However, it quickly become clear that my linear-time no-seek approach to page generation wasnt really going to scale to, say, more than 2 pages in a directory. mkpage only supports 2 commands, LOAD and STAMP. LOAD takes a path, and puts the file's contents where the directive used to be. STAMP is used mostly for atom feed generation, but is generalised to work in most cases where you'd need a timestamp.

Therefore, aggregate deals with most of the more complex parts of my website's build pipeline. A combination of some hardcoded behaviour (C lets you get away with way worse software architecture than elixir), and some generalised 'paradigms', has let me create this entire website with only 7 commands. Aggregate takes care of most of the more complicated commands, listed below.

• ANCHOR - generates a reproducible id for any content-item, another issue i was dealing with in kethel2
• PUT - pastes a tsv table value, verbatim, does still have some issues with newlines thought
• LINK - generates a permalink to a (section of a) page, for my microblog this uses
• ATOM - generates all atom metadata for an entry
• DATE - pretty prints the date

So that's it, honestly

Besides some dependency modelling in make, this is all that Kethel2 comes with. I hope that you find some inspiration in my architectural choices here, and if not, i'll still keep enjoying my sub-halfsecond build times.