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Got the initial template of my website working, so here's a first blog post to commemorate!

I tried several templating engines to get this site working, including at one point using the C pre-processor in combination with pcpp (which I aim to write a small post on in itself sometime). Eventually my friend aria recommended using Soupault, a templating engine written in Ocaml and based on TOML configs. It was semi-simple to use and has some very nice features for doing things like extracting metadata from the page content directly rather than writing it manually, as Soupault understands the HTML DOM natively. There were some rougher edges such as automatic indexing, which only happens at the level of the current directory for each page, and so for a full sitemap index a 2-pass approach is needed, with a custom script (python in my case) to generate HTML from Soupault's JSON index output. Looking at the source for Soupault it theoretically would not be hard to make it simply take an index JSON file as input for a sitemap when generating, as it already does this in other modes for external index generators, but forking Soupault itself was beyond what I had energy for setting this up initially.

I'm aiming to improve this massively later and more than likely completely rewrite this post in future once I have more of a website to go with, but for now this will do as a first entry.

Thanks for reading and see you later!