Menu:

About this website

To tell you the truth, I wanted to make this website long ago. I’ve got three blogs, Twitter, Flickr, awful lot of social networks accounts, but I don’t have a single where I can just tell people – who I am, what I am doing, what I like and what I dislike, and – finally, provide a comprehensive guide into “Roman Kirillov On The Net”.

So I created this page (or set of pages, if you like). It took me a while to figure out, how exactly I want to create it. I didn’t want to use Wordpress, MoveableType, Blogger and any of the blogging platforms at all – it’s not meant to be blog. I didn’t want to use any fancy frameworks at all, in fact. I wanted something simple, and finally I realised that I want a set of static pages. Yes, plain good old HTML.

Now, plain HTML sounds like a good thing, unless you should write it, style it up with CSS, care about links, menu, navigation, this and that – it frustrates me to no end. And then – suddenly, as it usually happens – I came across webgen – yet another little gem in the necklace of Ruby applications. It does few very simple things:

  1. First of all, it allows you to choose one of the designs. You can style it, change it, remove or add columns, but you have something to start with. Eventually I’ve changed 70% of the design’s code, but I had something to start with! It means a lot to me.
  2. It provides some template functionality – you can write HTML templates, which later are converted to static HTML pages.
  3. And finally, you can write your text – just write your text, in plain text, in Textile or in Markdown, like I am doing it right now. You create a text file without following any conventions at all, fill it with text, put it to directory, run webgen’s generator and it magically appears in form of styled HTML page, with navigation and menu links. Isn’t it brilliant?

So that’s the story how this website was created. After all fancy server-side stuff I do sometimes, it’s such a pleasure just write some plain text – and get some plain good HTML!

So, I highly recommend you the webgen as well as the original author of the theme I’m using – hope you’ll find it useful as I did.