Like any sane developer, I created Squarkdown because I needed a tool to do something, but couldn’t find any that could.1
The situation which led me to create Squarkdown should actually pretty clearly illustrate what it’s for. (I hope.)
So I store my personal wiki, [Assort], as a repo on GitHub. It’s filled with hundreds of .md files stored in a meshwork of folders. You can browse through them right on GitHub, and GitHub renders a lovely preview with GitHub-Flavoured Markdown for each file. This is certainly my preferred way of reading their content!
At the same time, I also wanted to share the content with non-techy people who probably wouldn’t be accustomed to browsing content through a GitHub repo. In this case, a website would be ideal.
How and why I chose Svelte / SvelteKit is irrelevant, but it’s my web dev framework of choice.
However, extracting the content from all those Markdown files to the Svelte site was… a little nontrivial, considering they were literally everywhere. That aside, I wanted a huge degree of control over their processing – adding metadata, changing styles, plus deploying only select pages.
What Squarkdown does is exactly that – it automates the process of collecting all the relevant .md files in the repo, processing and extracting their metadata, and generating their equivalent pages in the site.
- Uhh, or maybe I just didn’t look and decided it’d be easier (and cooler) to make my own. :P↩