Stranger Quarkdown is a successor to Quarkdown, one of my favourite projects. I say ‘a’ successor, because firstly it’s not indended to replace Quarkdown, it just satisfies a different purpose – integrating with Svelte/SvelteKit, rather than generating raw static websites – and secondly there ofc might always be other child projects.
I affectionately call it Squarkdown. Weird name, definitely – and ‘squark’ sounds like ‘squawk’, a bird. I find that kinda funny tho, ngl. ‘Stranger’ ofc comes from the strange quark.
Important
Upon searching up the Wikipedia link for ‘strange quark’ I have immediately discovered that a squark is a real thing. As in, scientists have used it to name something.
This is news to me, and it’s absolutely fricking hilarious. I love this. I love this so much.
I’m a genius.
(That was a joke.)
Since this was called ‘stranger quarkdown’, and I happened to be fallling in love with Ruby at the time, I decided to give a shot at writing Squarkdown with it instead of Python. Might as well flex the ol’ programming muscles.
Turns out complex string manipulation and filepath handling in Ruby is just as straightforward in Python, with the same predictable methods and a wonderful Pathname class. No regrets here!
What would this project even be if it didn’t use itself to build its own webpage. The Squarkdown site is built with Svelte/SvelteKit, using MDSveX for Markdown integration, Squarkdown for preprocessing, and a couple more Ruby helper scripts for automation.
Assets lovingly crafted in PowerPoint 2016 (offline), as usual =)