Website Look And Feel Generator

What...

MKSITE.SH is static website generator tool. It is best for small websites giving them a nice look and feel as per (a) costumized looks via css specials and (b) a nice feel through common navigation bar and (c) a sitemap index.

Why...

Most website generators are "sophisticated" tools in that they are huge and need to be preinstalled - thereby making for another dependency for a project just for its documentation. The MKSITE.SH is a few kilobyte, it can be attached inline to any tarball, and only requires sh/grep/sed preinstalled.

How...

Each project needs a "sitefile" (default: site.htm) that contains the common code like navigation bar and css block. Each "href" of the navigation bar source code is detected, and for each "*.html" we check for a local "*.htm" file. We build an "sed" script that converts the site->html and htm->html, thereby implanting meta tags (title!).

And...

That is enough for tiny projects with up to two dozen files. The script however detects sect1/sect2/sect3 relations of href'ed pages and allows optionally to build a multi-section navigation. Each html page only shows hrefs to cousin pages of the same section (plus section navigation items). This is good for a 100 pages website. More than most projects have.

More...

The script uses a two pass model, scanning href'ed htm pages for meta information (title, description, date) first. Only the second pass converts the files. From the first pass we have global meta info cache - which allows us to generate a "sitemap" overview file with sect1/sect2 relations of pages and the selfdescription info out of those pages.

Things...

This website has been built with MKSITE.SH itself, at the time of writing a 29KB shell script requiring about one second to convert each htm input file into its html view. Isn't that convincing...