I’ve rebuilt DaveSpace because the old version was a bit of a bitch to maintain. Old DaveSpace was built with hsc, an old and unmaintained (but highly flexible and capable) tool for HTML preprocessing. Essentially the pages were HTML fragments with custom tags which were then wrapped in layers of macros dependent upon which section of the site they were in. The custom HTML formatting made it harder than necessary to maintain.

Gerph now may well be the last person using hsc. Fair game to the man. He is hardcore.

Initially I’d dabbled with Octopress which wasn’t quite flexible enough and then made a more serious stab with DocPad which looked very promising for a while, but ended up being incredibly frustrating and slow.

So I’ve rebuilt davepace.co.uk using gostatic which is a static site generator built in Go. It lets me write pages using Markdown syntax and it is fast.

The changeover involved converting all of the pages entries into Markdown format. I also wrote a script to enable custom additions into Markdown in order to make the ‘slide’ sections in the ARM training course work.

Other changes include:

• An RSS feed!
• New stylesheet
• New blog pages
• New ARM syntax highlighting (I really ought to write a proper one for Pygments)
• Removed the Google Adsense advertising