1 Introduction

Just in time for the christmas festivities, I bring you: my TMP blog! My name is Chiel Douwes and you might know me as the maintainer of the current fastest metaprogramming library kvasir::mpl, author of the first parameterized metaprogramming unit testing library metacheck, or just that one guy. Anyhow, as you are currently reading this blog, you probably have some intrest in it which is why I’d like to give a short introduction on what this blog is going to contain and how it is produced.

Content

All of the posts here will be concise (as you can probably tell by this post) and informative, about various subjects that interest me, which will probably mostly be all things meta.

In fact, this first post is in essence a meta-post

When I’m working on a project and it could interest other people, I will probably make a post about it here for your enjoyment.

Of which there already are several subjects lined up

Production

This website is made using make4ht which can generate html files from LaTeXsources. Make4ht (with tex4ht as backend) supports all the commands needed for the packages used, and has extra commands to add custom html to the code. There are some packages that are used to achieve special requirements, like minted for code highlighting:

template<template<typename...> class F, typename State, typename ...> 
struct fold_impl { 
    using type = State; 
} 
 
template<template<typename...> class F, typename State, typename T, typename ...Ts> 
struct fold_impl { 
    using type = fold_impl<F, F<State, T>, Ts...>; 
}

Packages like environ and xcolor are also used to make fancy block comments.

Like this one

And because the default font is kind of lame and inconsistent across devices, I opted to use the Fira Sans font for text, and the awesome Fira Code for monospace text.
All this is built by use of a CMake script, keeping track of the different files that have changed and allowing for easier integration into my editor.

The entire website is available on github, where you can find the build script, the configuration and also all the posts in raw source form.

Conclusion

In conclusion, making a website in latex is a fun, but somewhat impractical way to put stuff on the internet. Since I like fun and impractical things this seems like the perfect exercise, but if you’re aiming at an easily maintainable website then you should probably go for some other solution. If you have any comments to make about the layout or readability of this website, feel free to leave it on twitter, as I’m not planning to implement a comment section any time soon.
More posts will follow soon(ish) about subjects that are more closely related to c++.