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+After going through a bunch of static site generators
+([pelican](https://blog.getpelican.com/),
+[hugo](https://gohugo.io),
+[vite](https://github.com/icyphox/vite)), I decided to roll
+my own. If you are more of the 'show me the code' kinda guy,
+[here](https://github.com/nerdypepper/site) you go.
+
+**Text formatting**: I chose to write in markdown, and convert
+to html with [lowdown](https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/).
+
+**Directory structure**: I host my site on GitHub pages, so
+`docs/` has to be the entry point. Markdown formatted posts
+go into `posts/`, get converted into html, and end up in
+`docs/index.html`, something like this:
+
+```
+posts=$(ls -t ./posts)     # chronological order!
+for f in $posts; do
+    file="./posts/"$f      # `ls` mangled our file paths
+    echo "generating post $file"
+
+    html=$(lowdown "$file")
+    echo -e "html" >> docs/index.html
+done
+```
+
+**Assets**: Most static site generators recommend dropping image
+assets into the site source itself. That does have it's
+merits, but I prefer hosting images separately:
+
+```
+# strip file extension
+ext="${1##*.}"
+
+# generate a random file name
+id=$( cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 2 | head -n 1 )
+id="$id.$ext"
+
+# copy to my file host
+scp -P 443 "$1" emerald:files/"$id" 
+echo "https://files.nerdypepper.tech/$id"
+```
+
+**Templating**:
+[`generate.sh`](https://github.com/NerdyPepper/site/blob/master/generate.sh)
+brings the above bits and pieces together (with some extra
+cruft to avoid javascript).  It uses `sed` to produce nice
+titles from the file names (removes underscores,
+title-case), and `date(1)` to add the date to each post
+listing!