In my pursuit of generating websites in the manner that I like, I end up pushing myself into using unorthodoxing methods of generating a website.
If you've taken a look at the source for this website, linked in the bottom left corner, you might ask yourself
With the power of Typst, I can quite simply draw
or communicate in the most beautiful language
For those not in the know Typst is a modern alternative to LaTeX. These two are software primarily designed to prepare professional or academic documents
Before the birth of this website, I mostly wrote prose with org-mode. The files would be parsed using a rust program into HTML and then rendered on my website (refer to webx below).
But recently, I've been wanting to publish more formal work as well, for example the Extended Essay I wrote for my International Baccaleurate Diploma on using ordinary differential equations to model electrical filters.
Ever since 2023, I've been learning and using Typst frequently to prepare my documents. I've watched Typst and its ecosystem grow from practically nothing. Not only is Typst strong right now, but its future is especially bright as adoption increases.
With the release of Typst 0.14, the typst HTML export api is more mature. So I decided to take the leap, although many things are still not complete like compiling a directory of Typst files to html. I hope through my early buy-in, pioneer the development of Typst as a static site generator.
I wouldn't exactly like to answer this question until my workflow is more concrete, but at a base, we compile individual typst files into html and layer css.
Specific compilation tooling can be seen in setup.typ, for example math blocks are rendered as SVGs, for now…
This part of the autology is a work in process, as I would like to finish some other features before updating it.
My first personal website (that I'm proud enough to claim my own), was named webx for its (ab)use of htmx. Later, I'll discuss in depth my (ab)use of vercel serverless rust functions to generate an entire static site.
Likewise, since I now use to Typst to generate my website, weby not only sequentially follows webx, but also uses the y from Typst, alike to using x from htmx.
I really didn't want to use javascript to make a cool website. As you might know I'm a massive rust fan, so I tried to write as much of my website in rust as possible, while also minimizing functionality loss that I would have in a regular JS framework.
I stumbled across rust serverless functions. I'm still not sure what a Vercel Function is, but when I saw that it could take a rust program and serve it at an endpoint my first thought was "could I serve an entire website on that?" (yes, yes you can).
So at each endpoint, we have a minimal templating engine running to output the content of the website. Each page is represented by a binary compiled to that endpoint. This approach was actually quite refreshing compared to the typical router approach taken for building an API in Rust.
Honestly, I would have lost alot of functionality without htmx and htmz. With these, I could update the DOM on the fly without having to rely at all javascript which was a game changer.
Designwise, webx took a prety terminal like approach with JetBrains Mono Nerd font and a colorscheme from ayu-light (my favorite theme).
I added a few gimmicks on top that I liked, for example a song player for When I 226, which is a great song. A dark and light theme transitioner, which I also plan to implement for this website. As well as a cool transition, for which I have no idea how to describe, between navigating different pages.
However, there were quite a few downsides to webx:
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