MKSITE is small

My primary goal has been always to make MKSITE.SH small enough so that it can be shipped along with any project of mine - and to also have all the standard functionality in it that I do not need to maintain multiple versions of it. A single mksite.sh file should be used for all of the projects I am using.

To that effect I like to have "magic hints" in the sitefile. Currently there is only one available at the moment, the one enabled by "<!--mksite:multi-->". From that magic hint some added functionality will be chosen that you can clearly see in the MKSITE.SH script - it is a simple "if grep mksite:multi" setting layout varialbes used in both the 1.pass and 2.pass being near the end of the file.

Currently the MKSITE.SH script is used in a dozen projects of mine but I expect to see it used even more widely. That is simply because I have been rewriting the MKSITE.SH script lately after gaining experiences with the usage of the script in those dozen projects. Now the script should be functional enough for all of them and by its redesign better maintainable and module.

To that effect, it should now be easy to build your own add-on functionality and have it enabled by a magic hint. Whenever something new comes along I can just add it to the MKSITE.SH script. There is enough room still before the script will become "bloated" - a 29 kilobyte at the time of writing is still "tiny" for a website generator of the presented functionallity.

There is a downside however with all that - the speed of the website generation is somewhat slow since we are dependent on a hundred calls to "sed" which may or may not be the lightning-fast tool. My earlier website generators were written in perl (or python) that have highly optimized routines to modify strings and the meta data cache can be built with special data structures in there that are highly optimized as well.

From current experience the MKSITE conversion requires around one second per file. Even for medium project websites this amounts to just a minute or two. If you pass out the hundred of number of pages however then you might want to consider using a special website generator and make it a dependency of your project. The MKSITE.SH is good here as well as it does not force you into any special source format, you can easily just pick up your htm files that you made up so far.

So after all, if you pass the 4 pages limit then pick up MKSITE.SH and write a simple site.html. If you pass the 20 pages limit then enable "multi" in MKSITE.SH and add 4-16 categories. If you pass out the 8 categories at around a 100 pages for the website then consider a big iron tool. If you pass out 300 pages then you should have already switched away for good - or broken down the project into smaller components ready again for MKSITE.SH usage. Where the latter might be a good idea for non-technical reasons too.