9. Calamaro
Calemaro is a way to maintain a website as if it was a book, or alternatively to design a complex website the way you would write a book. So if you can write a book, or at least write a paper with a few sections, you can make and maintain your own website. This website is made with Calamaro.
Any Calamaro website is originally written in a variant of normal text called MultiMarkdown (MMD) that is highly readable and at the same time can easily translatable to websites (HTML), pdf (for printing), LateX (for publishing), or rtf (for normal word processors like Word or Pages). See here for [a super short intro into MultiMarkdown].
Why Calamaro?
Calamaro is Italian for squid, a pretty smart animal that disperses ink when need arises. In our times webpages spread the “ink” in every direction, as the tentacles of squids and octopuses. In addition many squids are masters in disguise and camouflage since they adapt their body colors to the environment. Calamaro is, like the squid, highly customizable. A few well-chosen changes and you have a quite different website. So if you have ideas worth spreading that extend the capacity of Twitter or Facebook, Calamaro might be ideal for you, especially it you find writing a book more natural than mastering quite complex blogging or website software.
Calamaro key features
- Very small files, easily transferable to different platforms.
- Very little website design time and therefore a lot of content time.
- Easy translation into different file types
- Very clean HTML
- Optional .mmd file original of each HTML-page for collaborative writing. Collaborators simple mail adapted mmd-file to the website editor for inclusion in the whole.
- Very simple, yet highly customizable, website designs.
- Standard pdf-version of the whole website for online reading and storage in document selection.
- Standard whole website package for download a safeguard against internet breakdown or censorship.
- DonationWare, after donating you receive a code that allows you to remove the links to the home-base of Calamaro www.geopoliticsandcognition.com
Book to website
The idea of Calamaro is to link website design to writing a book (or at least a paper). Depending on the size of the text, either book parts, book chapters, sections or subsections form individual webpages that are ordered and presented in a logical and flexible way. For example it is as easy to browse only through chapter introductions as it is to read the whole website as a book from beginning to end. And when you use many internal links to headers, such as this link to Why Calamaro? one can read the book non-sequentially as if it is Wikipedia. Finally, Calamaro offers also a pdf version of the whole website, as book, for offline reading, and even the ability to download the whole website as .zip file as safeguard in case Internet breaks down or is censored.
A super short intro into MultiMarkdown.
For example to make something bold simply write it like **this**, or italic like *italic*. This link to this website looks like [link](http://www.geopoliticsandcognition.com). And this internal link refers to the subsection just below and looks like [internal link][Book to Website].
Not at all difficult. This paragraph is full with these “tricks”, but most long text are mainly text, with the occasional #Section, or ##Subsection headers, ###Subsubsection, footnotes[30], links to websites, yet another footnote[31], and quotes:
This is a short quote that starts with a
> sign before the quoted text
Multimarkdown is richer than the examples shown above. For example its also has tables
| Feature | Example |
|---|---|
| Bulleted lists | * before the items |
| Numbered lists | 1. Before the item |
- bulleted list item 1
- buttered list item two
Some text
- Numbered item one
- Numbered item two