While organizing my studio's various projects, I realized our documentation was a mess: different tools, inconsistent versions, and mismatched layouts. I wondered if it really had to be this complex to have a unified system for simple docs.

For the past couple of weeks, in my spare time, I’ve been standardizing everything into Markdown files within a /docs folder in each repo. To render them as static HTML, I built mdgen.

Initially, I planned a simple CLI to render HTML with a default stylesheet. Then, I remembered a Markdown editor I experimented with a while ago using the browser’s FileSystem API. I decided to dust off that code and create an online generator that requires zero effort. You just point the browser to your /docs folder, it processes everything locally, and you download the generated HTML package ready for your server.

However, I quickly realized that doing this manually for dozens of projects is tedious—so I built a CLI version to automate the process.

I wanted something lightweight that doesn't feel like a heavy static site generator but gets the job done for simple, clean documentation.

Side note: I’m actually thinking of adding some "fantasy" themes to use it for publishing D&D adventures.

Side side note: I'm fully aware that this currently works best for very 'standard' documentation and that the sidebar navigation system, in particular, still needs a lot of improvement... but I'm still having fun building it :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319713

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