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                    JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 28TH MARCH, 2026
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Site generator update
   DATE: Sat 28 Mar 14:48:51 GMT 2026

This week I’ve continued working on the site generator in the evenings. In
doing so I came across a really annoying accessibility issue. You can’t do
native pinch to zoom with text re-flow on mobile. You can pinch to zoom, but
then you have to pan around the page to read anything.

Having said that I’ve tried to make the mobile experience as good as for the
desktop experience. All features work on both desktop and mobile, mobile looks
good down to a viewport width of 360px.

Previously the generator had .md files for static pages and .md.gen for pages
with generated content. That silliness is gone and there is just .md files
now. All of the generated content is in indexes, so the generator just needs
to check for index.md pages.

I’ve added a fix-up function to the generator. This lets me clean up some of
the generated HTML. For example I rewrite task lists to not use checkboxes.

Indexes can now have a ‘sort’ meta-data field. This allows sorting of the
index entries. The default is to sort by the title text. However, on pages
like the downloads I sort by the link filename.

Some metrics have been added to the generator’s output. This is the output for
a forced rebuild of everything on the small test site I’ve been working with:


  2026-03-28T14:03:43.285Z: Starting
  2026-03-28T14:03:43.288Z: Collecting .md pages
  2026-03-28T14:03:43.299Z: Collecting .md indexes
  2026-03-28T14:03:43.308Z: Collecting assets
  2026-03-28T14:03:43.317Z: Generating meta-data
  2026-03-28T14:03:44.022Z: Checking for latest journal entry
  2026-03-28T14:03:44.064Z: Generating pages
  2026-03-28T14:03:44.326Z: Generating indexes
  2026-03-28T14:03:45.012Z: Copying assets
  2026-03-28T14:03:45.249Z: Processed: Meta 18/18, Indexes 9/9, Pages 7/7,
                            Inline 2/2, Assets 17/17
  2026-03-28T14:03:45.256Z: Finished in 00h00m01.971s


I’ve taken a lot of time thinking about how I want to handle images, such as
screenshots. At the moment I display a thumbnail or shrunken image in a small
gallery. Clicking or tapping the image shows just the image — which can then
be zoomed in on and panned around.

This afternoon I plan on adding a generator for Git repository information. It
appears on the “Downloads & Git Repository” page as:


                  * Git repository: development (dev) branch
                    Updated: Sun, 7 Apr 2024 20:07:20 +0100

                    git clone https://code.wolfmud.org/WolfMUD


However, I want to implement an improved solution, so the information can be
generated for any of my git repositories. Thinking of Mere, The Cottage and a
few others I need to add to the Annex :)

I need to add some parallel processing to the site generator. At the moment
everything is serialised. However, there is no reason not to take advantage of
multiple cores. Pages and indexes could be created in parallel while assets
are being copied and compressed.

After that I think the generator will be mostly ready and I can start moving
this website over from .txt files to .md files :) That will take a little
while as this site currently has 1,152 pages…

--
Diddymus


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