Directory as a website

The best website is the one which gives you the most freedom to express yourself. For me, the best website is this one.

I tried a bunch of different generators and blog platforms over the years, but I was never quite confortable using them. So I wrote a simple little program that generates a directory listing ready to be deployed as a static site. The directories function as the website menu. I like it a lot and find it to be very flexible.

There’s something special about accessing someone’s raw directory on the web, I think. You’re not sure what you’ll find under a given folder. It requires exploration and curiosity.

A website like this one does not require any thinking. I simply create a directory, put an index.md into it, hit a button and done, it’s online.

One thing I think is really cool is that, since every “article” is a directory, I can put folder and files in the article. I don’t need to worry about linking things. It means I can have unlisted content in the article, but still have them available in the page.

If you are tech-savvy and want to make a little website like this, you’ll find in this directory the complete Rust program and templates necessary to replicate the site. The code comes with a little documentation and it is MIT licensed. It’s not a fancy or ultra-performant solution, but it’s only around 200 lines, with 3 direct dependencies (clap, chrono and minify-html). Ah, of course, it uses the amazing pandoc to generate the HTML page from Markdown. So far, the program works really well (on my machine).

Peace.