~jakintosh/collect

/pages

Collect

Collect is a "plain text programming language" that I wrote for generating text files, and especially for websites. It is used to build this website.

/collect Stream

July 2, 2023

/stream /technology /programming /collect

Spent a good chunk of time today revamping a community website to add a blog, and part of that meant figuring out how to implement a "dynamic root path" for URLs. I had to make some changes to 'collect' for it to work, but I think it's more robust now: it should more fully be able to recurse through contexts looking for objects of a certain name (which in this case is the "root-override").

Adding this feature has made me feel a little bad about 'collect', since with only four months having passed it feels quite sloppy and difficult to reason about the source code. It's definitely not worth rewriting again any time soon, but it's worth keeping in mind as my web projects that rely on it continue to grow.

May 24, 2023

/stream /technology /programming /collect /colophon

As I started fleshing out components of this site, I wanted to add some new features to /collect. I added the ability to reuse the name of a @map as a value using "$NAME", and it can also be interpolated in strings with "@name". I also exposed a list of the @group objects on a @map using the value "@groups" on a @map. The first change reduced redundancies when writing new stream events, and the second made it possible to render all of the groups for each stream event.

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