wegben and inclusion of manual pages

Funnily enough, I haven't spoken about webgen yet. webgen is a very powerful static website generation tool written in Ruby. It was written with a very good plugin architecture in mind which makes it trivial to extend it.

Most of the sites I maintain (namely, SciYAG's, Tioga's and my former web page, the latter not being maintained anymore) are written using webgen. I recommend you have a look at those sites and at the website of webgen itself, you'd be amazed of the possibilities it offers.

SciYAG's website is making a heavy use of webgen's extension possibilities. I did write plugins for things as various as

• including a thumbnail of an image and a link to it with a code as simple as:

  {linkImage: Electrode_cleaning.png}

• converting automatically ctioga's shell script files into PDF, and converting any PDF into a PNG image with a thumbnail
• having a random image at every page (this really looks great in my humble opinion)
• use SVN information to display the name of the last author
• and many more things

My last addition to this wealth of plugins is a way to include a manual page within a webgen page, so that you profit from the CSS and from the navigation bar. You can get an idea of how it looks there. The source code is available as usual in the SVN repository.