The UmbrelixSSG Story: “In anger, I opened up my text editor. We were off programming again!”

Article incomplete. Initially written early the 14th day of September, 2022 a.d..

So, in anger, I recently opened up my text editor and typed the familiar, almost magical incantation, #!/usr/bin/env tclsh8.6. “We’re going programming again!”

I had taken down our old main website (previously available at https://umbrellix.net) due to fears of harassment related to the data I published on it, and due to fears of exploitation of the software (it was an out of date DokuWiki running on a questionable version of PHP). I had in its place a hand-crafted piece of HTML, now called emergency.html, which linked to my (specifically) website, and gave instructions for contacting us. I (well, initially Melanie) was going to write something called a “static website generator.” If you don’t know, a static website generator is a fancy name for a program that takes an input format (markdown, in this case), and produces a complete HTML page that is designed to be served multiple times. It’s mostly useful for content which is, as the name suggests, static - which means that it can be served without executing the generator again and again (doing that, you end up just using it as a CGI). These things can be as simple, or as complex, as your heart desires, and can be invoked a myriad of ways - from a Makefile, or from a shell script, or manually. Mine does not process the markdown; it outsources that to an external program - in the case of my usage, a program called discount, by the author Orc on Github.

Following section written starting the 15th of September, 2022 a.d. at around 8:38 AM UTC, by Melanie Bjornsdottir (she).

The stylesheet we use on our two websites, both personal affairs, is blatantly ripped off from that of a software collective I used to be a part of. They released their intellectual property in that stylesheet into the public domain, so there’s no problem, legally, with us ripping it like that.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but the program started in another name. A need to keep that name private resulted in the git history being blown away twice in the course of, I think, the 11th of September, 2022 a.d., during which the program expanded from just a getopts parser ([opts]isn’t covered by the modified CDDL, by the way. You’ve our full permission to rip it and use it in any program you would like - just credit https://umbrellix.net/software/ussg in your source code, and include this part about special permission for [opts]), to the earliest iterations when myself and Lightning still thought we were going to be able to have commands and data on the same line of a template (we were not.), to the “FIRST LIGHT!” iterations where we finally had working pages generated, using the headered markdown format and the template format as it has crystallized (commands start with zero or more spaces or tabs, followed by % and the portion past the % is passed verbatim to the [templcmds ...] ensemble as a single argument, enabling some extensibility)