2026-04-16 Use Oddμ to watch over a directory
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I was wondering how to expand on the use of Oddμ as a static site
generator. Here's an idea.

To implement a static site that gets updated whenever the page files
are updated, use a Makefile to produce a HTML file for every Markdown
file and then use a directory watcher such as entr to run make
whenever Markdown files change or get added.

Makefile:

    SHELL = sh
    
    all: $(patsubst %.md,%.html,$(wildcard *.md)) feed.xml
    
    run:
    	while true; do sleep 0.1; ls *.md | entr -d make; done
    
    %.html: %.md
    	if test "$<" != index.md -a "$<" != changes.md; then oddmu notify "$<"; fi
    	oddmu html -template static.html "$<" > "$@"
    
    feed.xml: index.md
    	oddmu feed - < "$<" > "$@"

To start:

    make run

The while loop of make run works as follows: The ls command feeds
all the Markdown files in the current directory to entr. The -d flag
causes entr to exit if a new file is added to the directory, redoing
the loop and sending an updated list of Markdown files in the current
directory to entr.

The rules ensure that any Markdown file that's changed triggers oddmu
notify except for index.md and change.md (since oddmu notify
changes these two) and oddmu html is used to generate the HTML using
the static.html template.

The feed is regenerated using oddmu feed if index.md changes.

Now you can update the Markdown files with an editor, or upload
Markdown files using rsync or scp and it'll work.

To learn more, see the man pages of oddmu notify, oddmu html and
oddmu feed.

#Oddμ

2026-04-21. I feel the urge to implement a daemon or watch
subcommand that watches over the filesystem and regenerates the files
as necessary. The benefit would be that it already knows about all the
subdirectories and it work on platforms such as Windows without a
decent scripting environment. Then again, if you're really into
Windows, you can figure out how to do it. I also don't know if there
is even one Windows user.