This Site Was Generated Using txt2web

Nov 16 2023

You may have noticed that the site looks a lot different now. I got bored of the old design so I decided to change things up a bit. One huge problem that the old version of the site had was that all the blog posts were on one page. This was mostly due to laziness, since I did not feel like creating a separate page for each blog post. What this means is that eventually the page would start weighing a lot and slowing down if I had lots of blog posts with images, since they were all on one page. I looked at static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll, which have lots of nice features like pagination that would solve this problem. However, I was not satisfied with these tools. They were very complex and I really just wanted something simple and minimal.

This is where txt2web comes in. Txt2web is a very simple static site generator that I created for making blogs. What it does is take a directory of .txt files and converts each .txt file into a full .html page. It then puts a list of all the blog posts sorted by date on the front page. Very simple and convenient for my case. It also has some custom syntax similar to markdown, but its not quite the same. If you want a full overview of the tool you can view it on GitHub. It is programmed in C and only depends on the C standard library. It does however use POSIX functions, so it does not compile on windows.

Txt2web is definitely not meant to compete with other static site generators, it is lacking a lot of features. It works for my needs though, and it was fun creating it. All I have to do to write a blog post now is write some stuff in a .txt file and run a shell script that will build it with txt2web, push to github, and push to neocities. :)

If you want to see what one of the blog .txt files looks like, you can view the source for this post on GitHub.