SuperElectric

Hello Blog!

Hi! I'm Oliver, and I've made my New Years resolution this year to actually write about some of the things I work on, instead of doing what I usually do and letting them accumulate cobwebs until I forget about them¹. I'm writing up a little post on my adventures with the beautiful VST3 standard and Zig, but in the mean time I'm going to talk about this site a bit, as it constitutes a couple days of side-projecting.

The main bones of the site have been ripped out of the corpse² of the blog I set up for my aborted games project, extremely legitimately acquired font and all. Where most people use something nice like markdown, I've chosen to write a really quite hideous script in awk, which takes my custom blogging format in, and spits out nice HTML that I can just pipe out to a file. A few years ago I taught myself awk for Advent of Code, and ever since I've been trying to find excuses to use it. My format does have some benefits beyond markdown, besides just the inconvenience:

1. I get to have my lovely footnotes³!
2. I get to flex my awk skills!
3. Cool points⁴

// Comment :)
const some_test = code;
var that = is + in / a;
fn very() real {
    language = "Can you tell I've been using Zig?";
}

and images:

Of course also it's nice to be able to control the HTML output and not be relying on someone else's markdown parser, but that's sort of besides the point.

Depending on whether I ever write any math-ey stuff, which may happen if I decide to write about some sort of DSP project, I want to try adding LaTeX math processing of some sort, but that can come later. As far as other infrastructure, the rest of the website is just HTML/CSS, and I deploy it via a GitHub action. There's one exception, which is a little JS function to highlight the notes when you click them, but I promise I'm not doing anything evil...

I'm gonna close this one out here, as it's mostly serving as a test to make sure allmy stuff is nicely formatted. The next post will hopefully come in the next few days, thanks for reading!

- OJF