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.

Dependencies

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

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

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

Nchrs is deployed to the webserver by the deploy.sh script utilising rsync.