Got carried away on a Sunday afternoon and the result is a static site generator that…

• requires no build step or deployment pipeline because the Markdown rendering is done in the browser through showdown
• fetches internal links without a full page reload
• ships as a single index.html file, to use as-is or as base for customizations
• loads a default style from style.css and default Javascript from scripts.js, both optional
• has no template language (for now) but allows to prepend shared Markdown/HTML/CSS/JS parts, e.g., for a menu
• lacks any advanced features!

As improvement one could do the link rewriting after fetching to show the final links in the tooltip and retain the base path context for links in includes that are relative.

Live demo: https://pothos.github.io/schlocky/

Or use it to render the Rust contribution guide.

The file to render gets specified in the URL as query parameter ?i=FILE. The default file is index.md. The .md suffix can be omitted, e.g., /?i=about (or /index.html?i=about if / does not directly serve index.html). You can even point it to a GitHub branch with ?i=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/USER/REPO/BRANCH/FILE.md. Note that the paths are resolved with the index.html folder path prepended to absolute and relative paths. For external HTTP paths relative movement works but absolute paths will be resolved according to the current page.

This repository already contains example Markdown files, example style.css and scripts.js files, and a Linux helper script to run a local Python web server to try it out:

./serve.sh
# Now open http://127.0.0.1:8000/

When using GitHub pages, make sure you create the .nojekyll file in your repo to publish all files.

The Markdown files can start with metadata that sets the page title and may prepend common parts. Here is how an index.md could look like:

---
title: My Page
includes: menu.md
---
Here is the *index* page!

The menu.md could contain this (here absolute paths are used to make the links also work when opened from subfolders where the menu is included with includes: ../menu.md, as the main page URL path still gets prepended to absolute links):

* [Index](?=/)
* [About](?i=/about)

And about.md could be:

---
title: My Page - About
includes: menu.md substyle.md
---
This is the *about* page.

Where substyle.md could inject CSS rules and code that are not part of style.css or scripts.js and only apply to ?i=about:

<style>
body {
  color: blue;
}
</style>
<script>
console.log("about");
</script>

cms.js