{title:}

Fri, 26. July 2013 – 20:10

This is a little something which has been bugging me for quite a while now: for a long time I have been wanting to change the local homepage used for the web-browsers on my computer, moving it from manually written HTML code to something generated from a more simple markup syntax. Given the fact that Doxygen for a while now has been supporting Markdown as a syntax (which I also have been using for some of the extended documentation for the TROPOMI SWIR calibration software), the decision was rather easy. Finally now this week I have been taking little while of an evening to make the necessary changes, setting up the overall (infra-)structure and filling in the basic contents.

Lars' local webpages    {#mainpage}
====================

<center>

<table border="0" width="90%">

  <tr valign="top">

    <td width="25%">
      Personal pages
      --------------

      * [Lars' local Wiki](http://127.0.0.1/~lars/wiki/doku.php)
      * [www.larsbaehren.de](http://www.larsbaehren.de)
        * [local build version](http://127.0.0.1/~lars/larsbaehren.com/build/website)
        * [local release version](http://127.0.0.1/~lars/larsbaehren.com/release/website)
      * [www.larsbaehren.com](http://www.larsbaehren.com)
    </td>

While the starting page still contains quite a bit of HTML in order to get the multi-column layout (which simply makes the page contents more compact and thereby avoid the need to scroll), the remainder of the pages is basically straight-forward Markup:

Work    {#work}
====

Projects
--------

 * \subpage work_aartfaac
 * \subpage work_lofar
 * \subpage work_tropomi

Institutes
----------

 * \subpage work_astron (_Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy_)
 * \subpage work_sron (_Netherlands Institute for Space Research_)

Naturally the whole process of generating the HTML output from the source files is driven by CMake; this way not only pages can be generated on the fly (e.g. by scanning other directories or inspecting system characteristics), but also all of the usual features of a normal software build are available (such as and out-of-source build and installation of the generated files).

.
├── CMakeLists
└── pages
    ├── Cinema
    ├── Computing
    ├── Photography
    └── Work

One of the things you may ask is: why all of this in the first place? Very simple. Given the fact that I tend to work with various web browers – sometimes out of the need to be able to access certain pages, sometimes out of interest to test an alternative program – using bookmarks does not seem like a good idea. Keeping information in a transportable format, which also can be moved across platforms, without a minimum of overhead hence seems like the way to go.