In August 2003, I got fed up trying (and failing) to manually keep my web page self-consistent by hand. Clearly, if my web page was ever going to be easy to maintain and look good, some automation was called for. In the end, I am using the following tools:
- The Website META Language by Ralf S. Engelschall. I use it for applying a common template to all the pages, generating a menu on each page, and doing whatever other scripting tasks I happen to need. It is also nice to be able to write most of the code in Simple Document Format (SDF) that requires less syntax than HTML to write. See the sdf-doc debian package for documentation on SDF.
- Album by David Ljung Madison. It takes my photo collection and generates thumbnails and webpages. I had to hack it up a bit to get it to do exactly what I wanted (generating .WML files, rotating images when their EXIF tags say to, etc...). I also modified one of the themes to better fit with my web page (here and here), and wrote a script to populate my pictures directory with symbolic links to the real pictures (I am rather paranoid about them) -- fixing album would be the better way to do this of course.
- Bibtex2HTML by Jean-Christophe Filliatre to convert my list of publications into HTML format.
- GNU Make to decide what has to be recompiled and what doesn't. For now these makefiles are hacks, but they will improve with time (main, publications, pictures). Getting them right is rather tricky, there are a lot of HTML files for my photo album, and recompiling them all takes about an 20 minutes. So I tend to be rather loose on the dependencies.
- Cascading Style Sheets to separate the formatting from the HTML as much as possible.
In the addition to the information provided here, most pages should have a link to the .WML file that generated them.