Fancy a look under the bonnet?
The Technology Behind this Website
I believe in the open-source philosophy. All the software used is open and free to use. All you need is a PC, which doesn’t even have to be particularly powerful.
I’m also a software developer. That’s why I don’t type my stories in some plain word-processing software, but use a more sophisticated “stack”. However, this isn’t necessary. A simple text editor is perfectly sufficient. After all, some of the world’s greatest literature was typed on an ordinary mechanical typewriter.
Conception and Text Work
For the actual writing, I use VSCodium. I write the stories in Markdown format. This is easy to learn and more than sufficient for this type of literature.
LanguageTool checks spelling and grammar for me. I run the free basic version on my own server. There’s also a useful extension for VSCodium called LanguageTool Linter, which immediately highlights my spelling mistakes in yellow.
I also use VSCodium to design concepts, and Minder as mind-mapping software.
All the work is, of course, version-controlled with git.
The source code is available at Codeberg. I’m a supporting member of Codeberg e.V..
As a base, I use Fedora Linux, which I’ve been loyal to since its first version.
Editing
For editing, I use a program I wrote myself to generate a PDF with large line spacing and wide margins.
Then I edit the text on a tablet with an ePaper display and a stylus. Nothing beats handwritten notes that I can quickly jot down on the page to disrupt the flow of reading as little as possible.
Of course, you can also just print out the PDF, but I prefer to work as paperlessly as possible.
Publishing
This website is generated using Hugo and a self-designed template. It’s purely static, so it doesn’t require a database or content server, which is why it’s so fast.
The entire publication process, including layout, hyphenation and generation of eBooks, is fully automated, so I can focus entirely on the content. A self-developed program generates all ePUB files from the individual stories and cover images. For this, I use Python, ebooklib, Jinja2, Pillow, pyphen and python-qrcode.
The following resources were used to design this website:
- Generator: Hugo (Apache Licence)
- Layout framework: Bootstrap (MIT Licence)
- Theme: Bootswatch Sandstone (MIT Licence)
- Fonts: Crete Round (Open Font Licence), Roboto (Apache Licence), Kalam (Open Font Licence)