The Free and Open Source Software Projects This Website is Built Upon in June 2023

In the past, I had a page called “Thanks!” dedicated to listing the free and open source software projects I was relying on to create this website. Sadly, this page was dropped during my latest overhaul, which is a shame because I do think it is important to acknowledge these fantastic projects without which this website would not exist.

That being said, I do want to approach this exercise differently this time. Instead of keeping one page up to date with the latest software stack I am using, I plan to publish a new article every now and thenI really like the idea of keeping track of all the wonderful tools I was lucky enough to find out and use over the years. .

Authoring Contents

As mentioned in my latest retrospective, I have simplified how I write my contents. Nowadays, all my write-ups are written in Markdown, and I use markdown-it  to parse them and generate nice and fancy HTML documents.

In addition to the base parser that markdown-it is, I am relying on an ever-growing collection of plugins:

• markdown-it-footnote 
• markdown-it-figure 
• markdown-it-highlightjs 
• markdown-it-meta 
• markdown-it-custom-block 
• markdown-it-mermaid 
• markdown-it-katex from @ryanxcharles 

As a consequence, this website also benefits from two very nice projects: highlight.js  for syntax highlighting, and $\KaTeX$  for displaying mathematics equations.

Frontend

In addition to normalize.css  to “reset” the CSS defaults of various browsers, this website could not exist as it is now without the awesome Tufte CSS  project. The sidenotes of this website could not have existed without it.

HTML Generation

While markdown-it is doing the heavy lifting of turning my Markdown contents in HTML pages, soupault  is the goldsmith which pieces these pages together into a coherent whole.

I really enjoy using soupault for my website. In a nutshell, this tool enables me to customize the pages of my website with an API very similar to what Javascript offers, but instead of the computation happening on the client side every time the page is loaded, it is done on my laptop once, just before I push the new pages. Just an example: for my sidenote pages, I was able to reuse the markdown-it-footnote with zero modification, and I just had to write a simple Lua plugin to customize its output to my (humble) needs.

The running log is also another good example of an ad hoc page I can generate using a simple Lua script.