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artagnon
308 Stars 9 Forks MIT License 339 Commits 0 Opened issues

#### Description

💎 beautiful website generator aimed at math-heavy sites

!
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# 23,877
coq
Emacs
f-sharp
sed
329 commits
# 76,444
Tensorf...
OCaml
ml
interme...
6 commits

# clayoven

clayoven is a beautiful static site generator with a carefully curated set of features. It has been built at a glacial pace, over a period of eight years, as my website expanded in content. I have a spread of mathematical notes, both typeset and handwritten, software-related posts, and some wider-audience articles; while clayoven is primarily aimed at math-heavy sites, it is good on all three fronts. The source files are written in "claytext", a custom format built for elegance and speed.

rdoc documentation is available at clayoven.artagnon.com.

## Unique features

• Small! ~500 lines of well-written and well-documented Ruby.
• Beautiful and easily extensible markup, with a dedicated vscode plugin for it.
• Automatically picks timestamps from git history, respecting moves.
• Server-side rendering of math, including commutative diagrams, via MathJaX and XyJaX.

## Demo

A starter project is bundled with the following

scratch.index.clay
:

whose rendered output can be seen here).

## Getting started

There is no published gem. To get started, clone, run

bundle
to install the required gems, and put
bin/clayoven
in
\$PATH
. Then, run
clayoven init
in a fresh directory. To start writing, install vsclay for vscode, which will provide the necessary syntax highlighting, IntelliSense support for MathJaX, and trigger-[incremental build]-on-save functionality.

## The site-generation engine

All site content is split up into "topics", to put in the sidebar, each of which can either serve as an index to a collection of

ContentPages
(as a bunch of
.clay
files in a subdirectory with the name
#{topic}
), or a single
IndexPage
(named
#{topic}.index.clay
).
index.clay
is special-cased to serve as the root of the site.

So, if you have these files,

.vscode/...             # provided by init
.htaccess               # provided by init
lib/...                 # provided by init
design/                 # provided by init
index.clay              # provided by init
scratch.index.clay      # provided by init
404.index.clay          # provided by init
blog.index.clay
blog/personal/1.clay
blog/math/1.clay
colophon.index.clay


clayoven automatically builds a sidebar with

index
,
blog
and
colophon
(each of which are instances of
IndexPage
).
/blog
will have links to the posts
/blog/personal/1
and
/blog/math/1
(each of which are instances of
ContentPage
), under the titles
personal
and
math
(the "subtopics"). If there multiple
ContentPage
entries under an
IndexPage
, the latter simply serves to give a introduction, with links to articles automatically appearing after the introduction.
IndexPage
and
ContentPage
are run through the same
design/template.slim

The engine works closely with the git object store, and builds are incremental by default; it mostly Just Works, and when it doesn't, there's an option to force a full rebuild. The engine also pulls out the created-timestamp (

Page#crdate
) and last-modified-timestamp (
Page#lastmod
) from git, respecting moves.
ContentPages
are sorted by
crdate
, reverse-chronologically, and
IndexPages
are sorted alphabetically.

## Usage

• clayoven init
to generate the necessary starter project.
• clayoven
to generate html files incrementally based on the current git index.
• clayoven aggressive
to regenerate the entire site; only requires to be run on occassion.
• clayoven httpd

## Configuration

1. .clayoven/sitename
is URL of the site, excluding the
https://
prefix.
2. .clayoven/hidden
is a list of
IndexFiles
that should be built, but not displayed in the sidebar. You would want to use it for your 404 page and drafts.
3. .clayoven/tz
is a timezone-to-location mapper, with lines of the form
+0000 London
. clayoven digs through the git history for locations, and exposes a
Page#locations
.
4. .clayoven/subtopic
is a [subtopic directory]-to-subtitle mapper, with lines of the form
inf ∞-categories
.

## The claytext processor

The claytext processor is, at its core, a paragraph-processor; all content must be split up into either plain paragraphs, or "fences" (multiple paragraphs delimited by start and end tokens). The function of most markers should be evident from the

scratch.html
produced by a
clayoven init
. The format is strict, and the processor doesn't like files with paragraphs wrapped using hard line breaks.

Clayoven::Claytext::Transforms::LINE
matches paragraphs where all lines begin with some regex, and
Clayoven::Claytext::Transforms::Fenced
match fences (could be multiple paragraphs) that start and end with the specified tokens. In addition to this, there are inline markdown markers
...
and
[...](...)
, for content that is to be put in
and
, respectively.

## Tips

• Check in the generated html to the site's repository, so that eyeballing
git diff
can serve as a testing mechanism.
• If you accidentally commit
.clay
files before running clayoven, running it afterward will do nothing, since it will see a clean git index; you'll need to run the aggressive variant.
• Importing historical content is easy; a
git commit --date="#{historical_date}"
would give the post an appropriate creation date that will be respected in the sorting-order.

## Planned features, and anti-features

• Have one unified dhall configuration.
• Allow the user to extend claytext syntax with configuration.
• Hit 100% test coverage.
• Get vsclay to report syntax errors.
• Anti: extend clayoven in ways that would necessitate an ugly implementation.