Jans Website

Using zine

This is a brief experience report on usage of zine as static website generator from 2024-12-20.

My main use cases are

  1. to utilize build.zig as convenient way for more complex tasks with C, C++ and Zig code
  2. having a simple to use and functional cache system for task 1
  3. effortless code highlighting that most of the time works
  4. static generated website and I would appreciate ways to integrate other content and document creation solutions.

I am mostly happy with the result, but less happy with the experience and time to get there.

  1. For example, I would prefer not having to invest several hours into figuring out which CSS properties work and which not and manually twiddling with sizes and use a bespoke and simple tool to generate static grids with wraparound instead of figuring out that flex grids dont allow wraparound.
  2. Automatic extraction of all html attribute classes for css style code for coloring would have also been nice, instead of manually inspecting the html code to attach colors.
  3. Specifying nice colors takes time, so the few hours were expected.
  4. Not having nested markdown lists properly working in SuperMD files is not a great experience. Especially, when finding out after converting html to markdown for the first level already.
  5. Dumping properties form scripty instead of having to look them up and having documentation in a more editor-readable way, for example text file, would also have been a nice to have.
  6. Comments within markdown blocks (empty line, [This is a comment]::) are undocumented and not supported in the editor setup.
  7. The release process for common platforms should be documented. Github Pages requires Build and deployment Source -> Deploy from branch -> gh-pages, / (root).

All in all, I am happy, but will fix the list issue in SuperMD files, because I believe this nudges people into not writing on edge cases and is a worse experience than plain markdown. Code polishing will also follow.