Each page of this site – blog.randomstring.org – is generally written in MarkDown or occasionally ReStructured Text. A Makefile offers handy shortcuts to set up a new static page, new post, or assemble it via the Pelican static site generator and publish it.

I write in vim on Debian Linux machines that I own, and can securely access from anywhere in the world via OpenSSH. Pelican’s generation process is largely in Python; parts of it depend on Pandoc. If you want to convert some format of text to another, pandoc is usually a good choice.

Static pages are served by the nginx web server, presenting SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

The Pelican page theme and CSS were originally svbhack by Giulio Fidente, but I’ve been changing it in numerous small and medium-sized ways for more than a decade. No JavaScript is used, at all. No databases are required. Most pages are served out of RAM cache, most of the time.