colophon

this iteration is my first attempt at sharing ideas in this manner. i spent a lot of time thinking about how i could plan for longevity while also keeping the writing process simple. in the merveilles community, writing your own static site generator is something of a rite of passage. and while it is fun to some, and can be a fun little challenge, it represents a deeper idea about building tools that work exactly in the way the user needs them to work. i considered using a variety of different tools to do this, but none exactly met my need. in the end, it made more sense to write my own.

the major requirements for this memex/wiki were:

• plain text is the primary (on disk format)
• minimal markup outside of markdown
• easily templated
• customizable, going forward, if i want things to change

the plain text is the most important. if later, i want to try to use some other system, i don’t have to import or export any files out of different formats. a few times i have started working with systems to later find that exporting or extracting the information i had addedd was considerably more difficult than i expected. or when it was exported, it wasn’t in a very usable format.

the content of this memex itself is in a pretty raw form. you can see the source code of this memex on sourcehut. you could even use the same tool to write your own if you wanted.

i wrote the first version of the generator in nim but later rewrote it in rust as a way to learn a little more of the language - just for fun. along the way, i also added a gemtext generator for those that perfer to use the gemini protocol - see the site at gemini://metasyn.pw using a gemini client.

over time, i also worked on trying to reduce the size of the site and improve the accessibilty. later i added images, which are by far the biggest impact to performance. if you have suggestions on accessibility, i would be open to hearing about them.

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