40Ants website

This repository contains the source for 40ants.com. The site is generated by StatiCL, a Common Lisp static site generator.

Build locally

Install SBCL and Qlot, then run these commands from the repository root:

qlot install
qlot exec .qlot/bin/staticl generate

StatiCL writes the generated site to stage/. To preview it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory stage

Open http://localhost:8000/. Edit the source files and regenerate the site to see changes; stage/ is generated output and is ignored by Git.

Where to make changes

• .staticlrc configures the site, content pipeline, Russian and English post indexes, feeds, and sitemap.
• posts/ and ru/posts/ contain English and Russian .post files; standalone pages use .page files in the repository root and ru/.
• themes/the40ants/base.tmpl controls the shared HTML document and <head>, post.tmpl renders individual posts, and index.tmpl renders archive pages. Theme assets live alongside these templates.
• qlfile and qlfile.lock define the Qlot dependencies.

Each .post or .page file starts with metadata between ;;;;; lines, followed by its Markdown or Spinneret body. For site-wide layout or metadata changes, edit the theme rather than generated HTML.

Blog posts may set description: in their metadata to control the HTML meta description. If it is absent, static/seo-descriptions.lisp derives a short plain-text description from the excerpt before <!--more--> (or from the full post for short posts). Images, video, and code blocks are omitted. An explicit description always takes precedence. Run XDG_CACHE_HOME=/tmp/40ants-asdf-cache qlot exec sbcl --script tests/seo-descriptions.lisp to check this behavior locally.

The build workflow runs the same Qlot/StatiCL commands on pushes to develop and on a weekly schedule, then publishes stage/ with gh-pages.