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minimaximalism

pong

you might have noticed 'minimaximalism' is the name of this website. that also happens to be the title of this article, coincidentally enough. you might inductively assume that the article is about this website.

you would kind of be wrong. this article is about the technology behind the website, which i think is kind of neat. since i'm presently (sadly) hosted on geocities, i don't have access to neat things like server side scripting, which made things kind of icky when i wanted to have a neat layout and not manually plug all my pages into it. i (maybe?) could have used javascript and done it client-side, but i don't know javascript and didn't really feel like learning it. maybe someday. anyways, normally, i'd just deal, but this time around i felt like doing something different.

what i did instead was write a python script that could go through a directory tree and convert it into HTML pages describing the interface you see here. all i need to do is modify or add a file and then rerun the script, and it'll spit out my website. it's actually quite cool and works nicely. i can, should i choose to, specifiy the order that things appear in the directory listing using special 'head' and 'tail' files, and it takes care of that, and otherwise just sticks them in whatever order the os gives to python. it automagically properly sizes columns and everything. very cool.

it still lacks a few nicetieisms, though. it can only do complete reprocessings - it can't 'figure out' whether a file needs to be rebuilt or not. this isn't a huge deal, but it would be nice if it could then print out a list of the pages i need to reupload, or something. that's the biggest problem right now. another potential cool feature would be to have it automatically upload everything, but that's impossible right now since i'm hosted on geocities. plus it would introduce some yucky complications for dependant files (i.e. pictures, downloads, applets, not that i use any of that much), so i don't know about it in general.

anyways, i think it's cool. if anyone wants to see the code, i'll happily send it to them. (does that count as open source?)