While studying about pollen (uses the Racket programming language) as a way to represent content possibly better than markdown or asciidoc, I ran across this article which provided the best introduction to Lisp that I have ever read.

The Nature of Lisp is great at making the understanding clear coming from an XML perspective.

It was surprisingly good.

It lead me to Matthew Butterick’s Pollen: the book is a program which is fascinating.

So I tried to learn it quick like I did markdown and asciidoc, but the way he does the tutorial is conceptual rather than by complex example like AsciiDoctor documentation.

I like the idea of the poly source that can be converted into any output like HTML, text, markdown, or asciidoc. I just have to spend more time absorbing the documentation and trying to apply it.

I have published books with both markdown and asciidoc and it goes pretty easily.

It seems pollen (and Scribble for Racket programming) do similar things to Asciidoctor asciidoc.

The challenge I have had is making asciidoc content into a complex web page with a TOC that links the contents. Asciidoctor makes a great one-page huge web page, but that is not what I want for a family history site.

You can see from my site about family history that it is all in one long page. Hmmmm. Pollen seems to have just what I want for the web rendering, and it seems I could get to books and pdf too. But I’ve gotten used to the ease of the asciidoctor-pdf gem app and really do not want to get into Latex.

So this got me wondering if I could build what pollen calls "poly" content and then process it to the various outputs.

The style of the docs if tough to slog through, however. I was expecting some example code and example rendered outputs so I could see how to put it together, but the pollen docs do not provide as many examples as Mr Haki’s Awesome Asciidoctor.

The examples in markdown and asciidoc help reverse engineer how it is made and help people new to it develop their own content in the likeness of the examples until they get it down and make their own.

There are a lot of similarities between pollen and asciidoctor. For now, I have more familiarity with asciidoctor and so I continue to use it as the source.

The pollen community is not as big as that for asciidoctor and that community is not as big as that for markdown. This leads to not having as many things available that others have already built.

I’m not a fan of Antora, however. It is too complex for my use cases. I want the minimum overhead to get my tasks done and it has too much for my taste.

Part of that minimum overhead is why I like continuous delivery so much with netlify + hugo + asciidoctor! It is so sweet because it is so fast and automated once setup is accomplished.

Now I just need more automated linters and scripts to check for everything that is possible to automate for writing content checks before they go to publish.

I like that pollen, markdown, and asciidoctor all let me write one sentence per line so I can use version control and diff apps to see what changed.

Anyway, I’m on to the next task.