About this website.

"Consider a future device, a sort of mechanized private library in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."
- Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

nchrs.xyz is the personal website, project archive and knowledge database of Clemens Scott.

It functions as an external brain, a place where I collect and store information that I learned, experienced or find otherwise interesting. As such, it is a living document that grows and changes as I adapt it to my needs.

Nchrs loads no JavaScript or any type of external content. It is built with simplicity, resilience and efficiency in mind. It can be viewed offline without the need of extra tools or local servers.

Nchrs consists of static HTML pages generated by a single-file C program. The codebase was forked from Oscean; the original author is Devine Lu Linvega. I chose to adopt Oscean because it allows me to focus on content rather than structure and is designed for offline usage.

The databases are in the human-readable plaintext formats Tablatal and Indental.

The sitemap can be found on the 404 page.

Dependencies

To build the website, a bash script called build needs to be executed. It compiles main.c and runs the executable that outputs the content of databases/lexicon.ndtl and databases/glossary.ndtl to single HTML files. Finally it removes the executable again. clang-format formats the code before compilation.

Nchrs supports responsive images and lazyloading to preserve bandwidth. The original images are stored in src/media/ and are converted to appropriate sizes and dithered by the batchVariants bash script using imagemagick.

GIFs are converted the MP4 using ffmpeg within the makeVideo script.

Additionally the build script can deploy the files to the webserver utilising rsync. For more information on the build script options, use ./build -h

Warning

This is the "I am not actually a programmer" caveat section. I taught myself how to code more out of necessity than conviction and have batched together bits and pieces of code to serve my needs. If someone reads this who actually knows what they are doing, you might be bound for one or another facepalm. If you don't know what you are doing, tread lightly, backup your data and/or use a versioning tool like git.

license

_License.

markdown

_{Nchrs supports a unique flavor of markdown format.}

Links