Dear Parlour, I Updated My Website

This letter was sent to my parlour mailing list on April 24th, 2019. It's about my recent changes to my website.

It's been a while since I sent my last message to this mailing list. My apologies - my new job as a property manager took up more time than expected, and I tinkered too much with my computer so was unable to easily draft something new to write.

Yesterday I worked out those kinks and updated my personal website for the first time since late-January. (There's still a lot to update, but it's progress.) In this letter I'm going to just talk about the site for a bit - how it's laid out, and how it's made.

I received a lot of feedback about my homepage as soon as I started sharing it. In case it changes, at the moment it is a brief paragraph introducing myself, followed by a list of pages and subdirectories (and subpages), followed by an index.

It's funny how an index, like what books have, looks so out of place on a website's index page. Of course, part of why my index looks exceptionally silly is that it also includes all the indexed terms and entries from my fantasy canon, so has entries about the fictional region of the Farsteppes listed right next to entries about the real company Facebook. But, consequence of the site being made for myself, first.

This index page, and all the documents, are generated by Org-mode's publishing features, from my org directory that looks something like this:

~/org/
     |src/
     .   |index.org
     .   |theindex.org
     .   |theindex.inc
     .   |sitemap.org
     .   |...
     .   |dear-parlour-i-updated-my-website.org
     |templates/
     .         |setupfile0.org
     .         |setupfile-base.org
     .         |setupfile-css-simple.org
     |pub/
         |index.html
         |theindex.html
         |sitemap.html
         |...
         |dear-parlour-i-updated-my-website.html