How It Works

Each page is a directory containing two files: a thin index.html shell and an _index.md or _index.json holding the content. Nesting these directories builds the site tree — a ContentCards block auto-populates from subfolders, back-links point at the parent page, and topTitle is inherited down the tree. (See Authoring for the content formats and block types.)

At build time, static-gen.js walks the site tree, finds every directory that has both index.html and an _index.md (or _index.json), runs the layout engine against each one, and writes the rendered HTML back into index.html. At runtime, layout.js does the same thing in the browser, replacing the pre-rendered content with a freshly rendered copy. The two paths produce identical output.

The generator also writes:

• sitemap.xml — every page URL
• llms.txt — a curated index for LLM agents
• llms-full.txt — the full site content as markdown, one page per section

When the optional llms-config.json at the site root sets siteUrl, canonical <link> tags and absolute sitemap entries are emitted.

Regenerate the static HTML, sitemap.xml, llms.txt, and llms-full.txt from the site root:

node colvmn/static-gen.js

colvmn can also render its own pages without being a submodule of itself, by passing the site root explicitly:

node static-gen.js .

In that case the root index.html references ./style.css and ./layout/layout.js directly instead of /colvmn/....