the web with all its metadata about itself is an interesting analogue of the mind, hence, its inclusion. Much of the content in this thread is merely notes concerning the Linux builds I use—memory aids for problems that may recur on subsequent builds.
For the curious, this site is built with Sinatra and the Nginx HTTP server with Phusion Passenger.
On a remote server, offlineimap and imapfilter processes, along with Ruby parsing scripts, manage and update comment responses to this site’s content and update this server with the comment snippets minus the email headers.
The content itself is, quite simply, written using the vim text editor with the vimwiki bundle. vimwiki creates a database of plain text files with corresponding topic file names. These raw files are referenced by the Sinatra web site application—vimwiki’s markup syntax is tranformed to kramdown markup, and the Slim template engine and CSS take care of the rest.
It sounds more complicated than it is. See the brief history and current configuration of this site to get the gist of this circuitous story.