
Building a website using AsciiDoc (2010) - blacksqr
http://gslsrc.net/l001_asciidoc_website.html
======
hultner
This is nice for a personal website. There's something oddly satisfying in
generating static websites from plain text or markdown.

For those of you who haven't yet heard about pandoc[1]. I was chairman of a
non-profit organization a few years back, during that year I generated all the
slideshows for my meeting agendas from plain markdown files using pandoc. It
was a breeze compared to working with powerpoint and the likes.

[1] [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

~~~
flurdy
I do most of my presentations using reveal.js
[https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js](https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js)
precisely for that reason: static text markup. And also then source control
friendly.

E.g for a conferences last year I made this presentation (please ignore
content) [https://flurdy.github.io/scaling-
scala/](https://flurdy.github.io/scaling-scala/) in just one page:
[https://github.com/flurdy/scaling-
scala/blob/master/index.ht...](https://github.com/flurdy/scaling-
scala/blob/master/index.html)

~~~
arximboldi
I use and like Reveal.js but admittedly I sometimes question whether it is the
right approach. I try more and more to make my presentations most visual, and
too often I end up spending too much time in the CSS fighting Reveal.js (which
tries to center everything and do auto-scaling, which is nice in general, but
a pain when you need a more custom layout).

Currently I end up just doing a lot of the graphics in Inkscape, splitting the
layers into multiple SVG files (one per layer) using a script I found, and
then assembling it together in Reveal.js using fragments. This technique I
used most in one of my latest talks: [https://sinusoid.es/talks/immer-
meetup17](https://sinusoid.es/talks/immer-meetup17)

Now I wonder if maybe I just want to use something like Keynote... but I only
use GNU/Linux and try to live in a mostly libre environment. Maybe Impress is
good enough?

~~~
accordionclown
your presentation was visually interesting.

it was also a bit slow to load, on my machine anyway, maybe due to my typical
dozens of tabs in dozens of windows... but i'd explore whether the .svg
approach was the offender.

of course, lethargy won't have any impact in the course of actually presenting
the thing to an audience, but there is much value to be gained by the after-
the-fact mounting of a presentation on the web for later consumption by
others, who will thumb through the slideshow at a much faster pace.

this is also why a presentation full of bullet-point slides, void of the
accompanying speech, is not very compelling.

so even if your show does end up being a little bit slower, i think that's
offset completely by your step-up in design.

~~~
arximboldi
Thanks for the feedback!

I think most of the loading time is in the images, gifs and web fonts used
(the svg a bit, but not so much). These days I don't see much of value in
optimizing the slides for after-the-fact consumption (video is much better for
that), and I just put them online so people that have actually seen the talk
can go back to some of the code, links and references. And in this way I
justify my lazyness for not optimizing the load time a little bit :)

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tkfu
Asciidoc is wonderful, especially with Asciidoctor, which has now become the
de-facto standard renderer. (It's what github uses, for example.)

It's as easy as Markdown (and the syntax is so similar it's not hard to
switch), but just has much better design, along with supporting the features
you need once you start having enough documentation that you need an actual
tech writer. Plus, it's still just plain text, so it plays nice with Git and
is thoroughly readable without being rendered.

------
bachmeier
As a reader, I am happy when I come upon a page that has been generated from
plain text or markdown. There's a tendency for the authors of those pages to
focus on content rather than loading it with graphics and Javascript and such.
My time is valuable. I can read what they're saying and get on to other
things.

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type0
So it's basically static site generator with Bash and Asciidoc. It has been
long time since I tried Hugo, how much of the Asciidoc/tor features does it
support?

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BeetleB
Lots of static site generators out there. I myself use Pelican, with Org files
as the format of choice:

[https://blog.getpelican.com](https://blog.getpelican.com)

