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                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 28TH FEBRUARY, 2026
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SUBJECT: Time for a change?
   DATE: Sat 28 Feb 19:18:46 GMT 2026

I don’t like change. For me this is quite a big deal…

15 years ago I wrote a very simple static site generator I called “Just Text”.
I used it to create this website. I just write plain text files, mostly ASCII
with a little Unicode. The site generator puts my text in a big <pre></pre>
wrapper and adds markup for links, footnotes and meta content. It then builds
the index pages. All pages are then pre-compressed. That’s it, very simple and
very fast. Only changed content is rebuilt. Typically a build takes a fraction
of a second.

Performance of the site is also fast. Even long pages typically load and
render in around 100ms. I like that and my readers seem to appreciate it.

Considering this site runs on a Raspberry Pi 4+ with 4GB RAM it handles my
traffic particularly well. Even with the onslaught of AI crawlers. Looking at
my traffic yesterday I served 36,378 responses using 144.29Mb of bandwidth.
Last Sunday I served 61,781 responses using 353.36Mb of bandwidth. That
included several clones of my git repositories and multiple copies of all my
downloads :/

However, for a while I’ve had this itch. I’ve wanted to do more with my site.
Add nice tables without having to using ASCII blocks. Maybe some nice headers,
a few highlights here and there, the odd image now and again, layout code and
examples better. Things I currently cannot do easily.

In short I’ve been thinking of writing a new static site generator for quite a
while. I know there are some good ones already, like Jekyll and Hugo. However,
I have very specific requirements and I’m a programmer dammit! :)

First of all I want to keep the source of my pages in plain text as much as
possible. I use Markdown already for a lot of things so I’ve decided to go
with that. For the Markdown processor I have a lot of experience using
lowdown[1]. It is very fast, has lot of features and support for many flavours
of Markdown: CommonMark, GitHub Flavoured Markdown (GFM), MDN Markdown,
MultiMarkdown (MMD).

I’ve written a Makefile to process my publishing pipeline and two helper Bash
scripts. One script creates metadata for the latest journal entry. The second
script generates the index files. In total it’s currently 142 lines of code.

Not too shabby for an almost complete incremental static site generator :)

Main thing I need to add are back-links to previous pages. I’m also working on
a minimal CSS style-sheet. I’d like to keep the look and feel of the current
site and see this as a light upgrade.

Once everything is sorted out and working I need to start the job of updating
the last 15 year’s worth of text files and editing them in Markdown…

--
Diddymus

  [1] lowdown: https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/


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