About The Author and This Project I am a thirty-something engineer with twenty years of programming experience (I had my first software job at the age of 16, an accounting program). My degree of Master in computer science is earned at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Apart from that I am holding various smaller degrees in sciences (electronics, chemistry), arts (economy, typography) and languages (english, french). I am currently employed at Tektronix in the telecom protocols simulation group. I am looking to switch into the biotech field which is a much more rapidly a changing environment that fits better to my personality - the telecom sector is currently moving rather slowly on the "evolution" path intead of bringing all new "revolution"s.

The presented project of "mksite.sh" is the last variation in a long series of website formatters ranging from as low as makefile snippets over perl/python-based generation to full-fledged xslt layouting including specialized xml data mining applications incorporating the last of science innovations (e.g xml/g). The "mksite.sh" script has been cut down by intention but still providing large parts of the functionality usually needed with documentation projects as far as I came across them.

Actually I am involved in many many projects around and many even opensource, just google for "guidod" to get a few references. In many cases programmers keep on making up documentation very late in the process of their spare-time project. And in even more cases it consists of a README.TXT and TODO file shipped along with the sources. And in here it is not uncommon that these very basic paragraphs are folded into websites with the same "plain" style - including hardly any navigation help, cross reference or visual feedback.

Of course programmers did what they do best - they created themselves little tools to do the formatting out of a simple input text into the website presentation thereby making it easier about all that presentation stuff. Freshmeat lists more than a 1000 of such website formatters, some bigger some smaller. But they have atleast one problem - they are written in the favourite programming language of the developer that did need documentation for his project. And so did I.

And now here we finally do it differently - a website formatter with no third-party dependencies, interestingly being unique among the 1000 formatters listed at Freshmeat. There's nothing else like this done before. And its design is targetted so that you do not need to read long documentation to get the hints needed for instructing the tool to build the navigation items right - in its heart the "mksite.sh" program still looks like:

        cat site.htm       > index.html
        cat index.htm     >> index.html