<subject "How my Web Page was Made">
<nedstat "ACYcywCCssyd97vSgTFWZTamPuRA">

<sdf notypo>

In August 2003, I got fed up trying (and failing) to manually keep my web
page self-consistent by hand. Clearly, if my web page was ever going to be
easy to maintain and look good, some automation was called for. In the end,
I am using the following tools:

* {{[jump="http://thewml.org"] The Website META Language}} by Ralf S.
Engelschall. I use it for applying a {{[jump="../template.wml"]common template}} 
to all the pages, generating a menu on each page, and doing whatever other scripting tasks I
happen to need. It is also nice to be able to write most of the code in
Simple Document Format (SDF) that requires less syntax than HTML to write.
See the sdf-doc debian package for documentation on SDF.

* {{[jump="http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album"] Album}} by David Ljung
Madison. It takes my photo collection and generates thumbnails and
webpages. I had to {{[jump="../pictures/album2wml"] hack it up a bit}} to 
get it to do exactly what I wanted (generating .WML files, rotating images
when their EXIF tags say to, etc...). I also modified one of the themes to
better fit with my web page ({{[jump="../pictures/.theme/album.th"]here}} 
and {{[jump="../pictures/.theme/image.th"] here}}), and wrote a
{{[jump="../pictures/synclinks"] script}} to populate my pictures directory
with symbolic links to the real pictures (I am rather paranoid about them) -- 
fixing album would be the better way to do this of course.

* {{[jump="http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/bibtex2html/"] Bibtex2HTML}} by
Jean-Christophe Filliatre to convert my {{[jump="../publications/mypublications.bib"]
list of publications}} into HTML format.

* {{[jump="http://www.gnu.org/software/make/make.html"] GNU Make}} to decide what
has to be recompiled and what doesn't. For now these makefiles are hacks,
but they will improve with time ({{[jump="../Makefile"] main}}, 
{{[jump="../publications/Makefile"] publications}}, {{[jump="../pictures/Makefile"] 
pictures}}). Getting them right is rather tricky, there are a lot of HTML
files for my photo album, and recompiling them all takes about an 20 minutes. So
I tend to be rather loose on the dependencies.

* {{[jump="http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/"] Cascading Style Sheets}} to
separate the formatting from the HTML as much as possible.

* {{[jump="http://nedstat.com"] Nedstat}} is used to keep track of my web
page statistics for now.

In the addition to the information provided here, most pages should have a
link to the .WML file that generated them.

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