(2026 note: this post is super old, and I've moved onto better systems. I'm keeping this up for archival reasons :))

I restructured the backend of this website to feature a self-built static HTML generator and markdown parser, in addition to many other small changes. I did this not just to increase performance, but to ensure my website is designed to last and sufficiently rugged. I eliminated many moving parts from my website stack—on top of now serving static content, I dropped MongoDB, many npm libraries, and all external APIs from my stack. In this post I'm going to briefly explain my static HTML generation system.

Static HTML generator

A static HTML generator is a tool that generates HTML pages from raw data. Prebuilt tools exist to do this: Next.js, Hugo, Gatsby, and Jekyll are some examples. I've tried these tools out, and they're not for me. Too much bloat and not enough low-level control. So, I built my own.

My initial file setup is something like this:

.
|-- raw
     |-- item1.html
     |-- item2.md
|-- templates
     |-- item_template.html

I want my static HTML generator to generate this:

.
|-- serve
     |-- item1.html
     |-- item2.html

Everything's in one python file - build.py - which is invoked through a script in my package.json file as shown below:

"main": "main.js",
"scripts": {
	"start": "python3 build.py && node main.js"
},

The formatting for the template files is the following:

HTML content
{{Data}}
HTML content

Build Script

The code behind build.py is actually quite simple. Pseudocode below:

open template, item, out:
	if item is html : move file to serve
	elif item is md:
		for line in template:
			if "{{Data}}" in line : out.write(interpret(item))
			else : out.write(line)

Interpreter

The interpreter is pretty simple as well—all I'm doing is looping through each line and using regular expressions to filter and replace markdown patterns with HTML. Pseudocode below:

def interpret(markdown):
	lines, out = all lines in markdown, ""
	for line in lines:
		if re.findall(case 1, line) is not None:
			out += formatted html
		elif re.findall(case 2, line) is not None:
			out += formatted html
	
	return out

Implementation

The source code for my full implementation is on hosted on Github.