Building this Site

This website is created with a hand-rolled static site generator. In this series I'll talk about some of the infrastructure I've built towards making the website.

Infrastructure

My static site generator asite, is primarily programmed in OCaml, using Dune and OPAM for the build system. The templating language used is custom, as is the majority of steps in the site building process. I do use a number of external packages:

• cmarkit — blog posts are written in markdown, asite uses cmarkit to render the markdown into HTML.
• hilite — for code syntax highlighting, though this isn't a complete solution, more on this in future posts.
• js_of_ocaml, search — used in building the search page, more on this in the future.
• markup — when generating rss, markup is used to parse and process a blog post's HTML into just a teaser, to keep the size of the rss file small.
• subprocess — used to invoke esbuild as a step in the build process, more on this in future posts.
• yaml — blog posts and other pages have a YAML frontmatter containing "columns" in the "post database".
• alcotest, cmdliner, logs, re, timedesc, and yojson — miscellaneous low level utilities used all over the place.

OCaml Environment

I first learned OCaml in my undergrad Programming Languages course and liked it enough to use it for my Senior project. As a result, I know how painful it used to be to build OCaml programs 14 years ago. I was pleasantly surprised when I picked OCaml back up for this project, just how nice the system feels now. Dune + OPAM made it possible to get a working project with a dependency up and running in a few minutes.

More to come!