Using HTML for This Wiki

Trying to find the right static site generator has proved to be too much of a hassle for me. I've gone through at least 4 of them. I made the mistake of using Jekyll (a reminder why I don't touch anything Ruby related). Then went to Zola for a bit. But, blogging does not work for me.

Eventually, I decided to move to a wiki approach. I knew I didn't have the spoons to manage a CMS approach. I'd rather something static. This adventually lead me to writing Snarl. And then re-writing Snarl.

Originally snarl used Factor's formatting. However, loading Chloe (factor's templating language) required loading furance related vocabularies. These vocabularies are extremely slow. Worse still, deploying Snarl to a executable required a massive amount of metadata. Both Farkup and Chloe depend on information that gets striped by the deploy tool.

So, Snarl got re-written. I ditched the markup. Ditched the templates. Snarl now parses pages as XML then uses simple string replacement to build the wiki pages. These changes made Snarl faster to load, smaller to deploy, and faster to assemble the wiki.