First you shape your tools...

2023-09-22 13:30 • 192 words • ~1 min read ⏲

...and then your tools start to shape you.

So, after I've managed last week to switch over to my custom SSG for building the website, this week I spent time to play around and explore a few things, that I would not have done, if I needed to maintain them manually.

The first addition, inspired by Daniel Fedorin, is a content graph, which visualizes how connected my posts actually are. As it turned out, not that much and even less than I had thought. A lot of articles are "orphaned" (meaning, not linked to internally). The second, less pretty, but probably more useful, outcome are automatically created backlinks for each article. The last little new thing is syntax highlighting with Prism, which yielded the philosophical question: does my css still count as classless, if the classes in the markup are only created programatically?

To sum up, what started out as the musing of a "weird dude who writes raw HTML", is moving up on the x-axis of this chart towards the static gen basin. For as, much I would like to pretend otherwise, tools matter at least a little bit.