ta-sa.org - Ta-sa.org

ta-sa.org website

This page is about the technology behind this website. Until April 2008 I used to use my self written online content management system aka ECMS.

I changed it to a more static approach to improve the integration with the tools I daily use, mostly: rxvt-unicode, vim, Perl and Git.

I have local checkouts of the git repository of this website on mostly all of my computers. I change the content locally usually by using vim and rxvt-unicode. After I'm finished with the changes I commit and push the changes to the git repository on the webserver, where the post-update hook of the git repository there will automatically rebuild the static pages of the website.

In future I plan to add a web interface to edit files and update the git repository via a web browser when I'm not at home or don't have my computer at hand.

The content of this website is put together by my self written Perl macro processor: pmak. It's a fairly small script, only around 200 lines of code. It allows simple macros like {vim} to include a linked link, the code of that macro looks like this:

{!vim( ma(x => 'http://www.vim.org/', 'vim') )}

The syntax is pretty simple, if a '!' follows the '{' the macro is being defined. The contents in the parantheses of {!vim( ... )}} is evaluated as Perl expression which forms the contents of a subroutine which is called when the macro is called via {vim}. The return value of that subroutine is then concationated to the output.

Because '{' is overloaded with the macro syntax it can be escaped by '{{'. Escaping of '}' in normal text is not neccessary, but '}}' will also result in a '}' for more consistency and because I usually balance all parantheses I write.

Macros can also have parameters, see the x macro I use for external links:

{!x(
   @_ > 1
     ? "<a href=\"$_[0]\">$_[1]</a>"
     : "<a href=\"$_[0]\">$_[0]</a>"
)}

To define an external link I write: {x('http://www.google.de')}, or if I want to label the link differently: {x('http://www.google.de','Google')}. The contents of the parantheses in a macro call like that is simply evaluated by Perl.

However, there is also some syntactic sugar for the macro arguments. You can post-fix the macro name with a '~' to tell the processor to evaluate the arguments as comma seperated values:

This way you won't have to quote everthing. But another nice thing is that the delimiter can be customized. The character after the ~ (if it is not '(') is used as delimiter of the list (it's just ',' by default). Here an example:

Google, a nice search machine!.

Of course another way to quote would be to use the Perl quoting mechanism: {x(qw[http://www.google.de Google])}.

Another nice feature is the ability to embed Perl code in the HTML more directly. For example this will print out a list of the numbers 1 to 10:

<ul>
{: for (1..10) { :}
   <li>{?$_:}</li>
{: } :}
</ul>

Result:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

You can also call macros from the {perl} code directly via the ma subroutine:

{:ma(x => qw{http://www.google.de/ Google}):}

There are some other subroutines defined for defining macros from perl (dmak) and to escape HTML and URLs: esc_url and esc_html.

I invite you to take a look at the page log template, where I generate the Page Log.

Feel free to use the pmak script and ask me if you got questions. (see Contact).