Rationale

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/Kit 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. Deeply nested folders, stored alongside other files, some hidden files that I didn’t want to be deployed… I wanted a huge degree of control over their processing.

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. It means I can write content in Markdown as usual, then simply configure a few options in squarks, and have the peace of mind that it’ll all be automatically reflected in the site.