wiserone.com

The public site for The Wiser One — a daily quote, published as a static site and served from GitHub Pages at wiserone.com.

Built with SSG.

Layout

_data/site.json       site metadata (title, description, url, …)
_data/quotes/*.json   the quotes — the source of truth for all content
_layouts/             page templates, CSS and JS
_posts/               generated markdown — do not edit by hand
tools/build_posts.py  regenerates _posts/ from _data/quotes/
tools/unescape_content.py  post-build fixup, see below
build.sh              the whole build
public/               build output, gitignored

_posts/ is derived. To change content, edit _data/quotes/*.json and rebuild; anything written directly into _posts/ is deleted on the next build.

Building

cargo binstall ssg     # or: cargo install ssg
./build.sh

Output lands in public/. Serve it with any static file server.

The daily quote

index.html is the quote for the current day, chosen as day-of-year % number-of-quotes. That is deterministic for a given day, so a rebuild produces the same page, and it advances on its own without anyone editing content. The workflow therefore runs on a daily schedule as well as on push — without that, the front page would freeze on whatever day the last push happened.

Why there is a post-build fixup

tools/unescape_content.py exists because ssg renders markdown to HTML correctly and then escapes the result when it substitutes {{content}}, so a page would show literal <blockquote> text.

It only rewrites the block inside <main>. The same content is also interpolated into meta[name=twitter:description] and the JSON-LD block, where it is correctly escaped and must stay that way: unescaping it there yields a content="<div lang="en">…" attribute that ends at the first inner quote, and JSON-LD that no longer parses.

Deployment

.github/workflows/build.yml builds and publishes public/ to the gh-pages branch. The deploy is guarded — it refuses to publish if index.html, archive.html or CNAME are missing, if fewer than 60 pages were produced, or if the front page has no rendered quote. Since the branch is force-orphaned there is no previous commit to fall back to, so a bad build must not reach it.

CNAME is committed at the repository root and copied into public/ on every build. It has to be republished each time, or the force-orphan would drop it and the custom domain would be lost.