8. Colophon

Here’s the obligatory blurb about my particular geeky way of creating this web page:

Playing with putting together a web page, I have gone through flat html, frames, blogs using my own blogging engine shell script, and then most recently, Wordpress. But none of these things pleased me.

Then I ran into Christopher Browne’s Web Pages and I thought to meself: self, thought I, this is what a home page ought to be about: easy authoring, programmatic deployment, and good (or great) usability. I played around with John Gruber’s Markdown text formatting rules first, using John MacFarlane’s Haskell library Pandoc to convert the markdown text to Docbook XML, and thence to xhtml. But in the end, being the Emacs freak I am, I ‘ran home to mama’: I discovered the Emacs Muse package. So now I write the text for the page in plain text, lightly marked up ‘.muse’ files using Emacs 22, and then convert to Texinfo format with Muse. From there a script (called programmatically from Muse) runs a bit of ‘texi2html’, a dash of ‘perl’ and just a pinch of ‘m4’; I use a .css stylesheet for presentation and Bob’s-your-uncle.

As for other bits, the site is hosted on an old plain-vanilla PC running Debian Hardy Heron, Apache2, etc.