commit bf3adb63499f95269ede6ed0eba8d143e02953b1
parent 027ca18e74a629b7e5e214c5fac68ff6bae087c2
Author: Oscar Benedito <oscar@oscarbenedito.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2020 22:01:39 +0200
New entry: Adding about pages to stagit
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 55 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/blog/2020-08-15-adding-about-pages-to-stagit.md b/content/blog/2020-08-15-adding-about-pages-to-stagit.md
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+---
+title: "Adding about pages to stagit"
+slug: "adding-about-pages-to-stagit"
+categories: "Technology"
+tags: [
+ "Git",
+ "Personal server",
+ "Self-hosting",
+ "Software",
+ "Website"
+]
+date: 2020-08-15T19:59:00+00:00
+---
+
+I use [stagit][sg] to show the public repositories of my Git server on the web.
+I chose stagit because it is a very simple and lightweight tool, which makes
+tinkering with the source code very straightforward (which I have been doing a
+bit lately) and because the resulting website is static: easy to set up, faster,
+and there aren't any application-specific issues (there is no application).
+Static sites are also nice because you know exactly what is going on when a page
+is requested—the file is served—, whereas if it is a dynamic site, you might or
+might not know what operations the server is doing to answer the request.
+
+Stagit doesn't have many features. This isn't necessarily bad, as it keeps the
+source small and readable and it still does everything I consider necessary, it
+even has an Atom feed for commits! The one feature I really missed was being
+able to show an about page with the repository's readme file when it is
+opened[^nt]. For me, it is a basic feature, especially with repositories for
+projects without a website/wiki. When I hear about a piece of software, the
+first I do is go check out the repository and read a bit about it, and readme
+files make that easier. Since most of my repositories have readmes written in
+Markdown, I wanted stagit to convert them to HTML, so they could be shown nicely
+on the repositories' website.
+
+[^nt]: Stagit has a link on the navigation bar to the readme file, and you could
+ easily make that the default `index.html` file, but it is just the page with
+ the raw file (as any other file is shown), it isn't presented like an about
+ page.
+
+If you want to try it out yourself, the change on stagit is very simple, just a
+couple of lines, but it will add a dependency to the program[^dep]. I use
+[md4c][md4c] to parse the files, and it is ridiculously fast. I haven't noticed
+any changes in the time it takes for stagit to run. Check out [this commit][cm]
+if you want to know how I did it, and feel free to suggest other approaches if
+you think they are better.
+
+[^dep]: The dependency is only for parsing Markdown, if you don't need that, you
+ can just show the raw file without the line numbers and metadata, this is what
+ [I do][nm] when the readme file isn't a Markdown file.
+
+
+[sg]: <https://codemadness.org/stagit.html> "Stagit blog post — codemadness.org"
+[md4c]: <https://github.com/mity/md4c> "md4c — GitHub"
+[cm]: <https://git.oscarbenedito.com/stagit/commit/1fdbc7e8ef4025e50678261ca670daca85ac298c.html> "Add about page for repos with REAMDE — git.oscarbenedito.com"
+[nm]: <https://git.oscarbenedito.com/stagit/commit/1fdbc7e8ef4025e50678261ca670daca85ac298c.html#h5-5-16>
