The Moose Have Retired

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

For the last 20 years, I have been developing my own “static site generators” in order to create pages for my personal website. Static site generator have many benefits when compared to Content Management Systems, especially in terms of security, but also because they are generally more “low maintenance”. Did I tell you that the last edit on my pages were in December 2015.

Developing your own site generator is also the occasion to play with new technologies, or at least technologies that I do not have to use in my work. One of the best example may be the original system that I developed in 1997 for generating my (HTML) bibliography pages from a BibTeX file. It was based on a specially crafted .bst file, written in a postfix stack language, mixing elements from Pascal and Postscript.

After working on my own DSL (for content description) and Perl (for page generation) for almost 10 years, the last iteration of my web site was based on the use of XML and XSLT. This was a good side-project at a time when I was in charge of teaching XML technologies at Université de Provence.

Nevertheless, Web technologies have become more and more complex, and it is simply not possible to keep the pace with new evolutions in front-end development. One example could be the need to develop accessible websites; use responsive pages; rely on a flexible grid layout; …

This is the reason why my new site relies on the Hugo site generators and the Hugo Academic theme. Let us hope this solution will stay stable for the next 10 years.

As for the title of this post, it is a nod to the Calculi for Mobile Processes pages. Go see the moose; they have been retired for quite some time now.