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The static generator used to create this site, suckgen has had some improvements that are worth talking a little bit about. We introduced suckgen here.

Basic Documentation

I've finally added some basic documentation in the form of the README, including building and basic usage. It should be enough to get a determined someone off the ground, especially as they can peek at the code of this site to help out.

New Configuration Format

Suckgen has now also deprecated the static configuration file, in favour of loading a Lua config file. The old behaviour should continue to work, but if it breaks, I probably won't care enough to fix it.

The use of a config file now also means that you can create your own global variables that you can use across all files, which we're already taking advantage on this site.

TOC Improvements

The TOC variables now try and also carry the model data, so if a page has a description variable, for example, you can now access it when iterating the TOC.

Sorting is now more intelligent, based on a proper byte-by-byte string comparison of the name variable.

Template Improvements

The template renderer now also renders xml files.

Future: At some point you should be able to control what files are rendered with your configuration file, but not yet.

Bug Fixes

A bunch of bug fixes have been added.

• Template engine creates less incidental whitespace. Especially after {{ and }} injections.

• Off-by-one errors when creating path variables should be gone, now.

• Processing template bail-out errors now give a hint as to what went wrong to stderr.

• Prevent include from overwriting the entire template by accident.