Farris & Faulds Website Announcement
Today we've officially setup our (quite basic) website. The motivation behind this is to get something up that we can use as a development blog. So there isn't much to the website here other than just the bare bones to make it incredibly easy for us to make posts.
How it works
I suppose if this is going to be a dev blog, I should mention how I've structured this website to automatically build and update itself. The website for the most part is just static HTML pages, we don't have anything to do with accounts, logins, tracking, or any of that. So we've chosen to host our website using GitHub pages. It's a very easy setup to get things going and we don't have to worry about hosting the servers ourselves (though we have a ton of experience doing so). By hosting on GitHub pages, it allows us to focus on the software and games we are working on, without having to waste time on servers and managing the website itself.
So now onto the good stuff, how is our website built? Well it's all automated, we create/update a markdown .md file, and then commit that file to the GitHub repository. Before you ask, no, we are not using Jekyll or any of those sorts of things, those are a bit too complicated for my blood. Instead we are using a GitHub action that listens to when we make any commits. From here, it will run a Lua script that goes through all of the markdown files, compiles them into HTML, and then creates a JSON array file (sorted by date) to be used for searching/indexing later. This is how we are able to list all of our posts on the main page of the blog.
One other thing is that you need good clean metadata on a webpage. So we use a Jekyll style heading to the markdown files (which is stripped), in order to create variables for the HTML generation. There we can put special CSS and JS files as well, so it's not just for the HTML meta.
What's next?
Well, as I mentioned, I am not interested in spending too much time dealing with website related things. I believe what we have here is a good start, I may edit some of the CSS and all that though. Now I'm going to be returning to the software that we've been developing recently. Expect some more development blog posts as we go.