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+start
 2019-10-07
 2019-10-08
 2019-10-09
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+The system described in the thesis and subject to the following blog posts was partially pre-existing to the work
+done as part of the thesis and thesis project. The `mmmfs` system was originally developed as the software for my
+personal website, with development beginning around May 2018. In this phase of development the website and system
+changed shape drastically multiple times.  In the following paragraphs I will describe the state of the project at
+the last revision prior to the beginning of the thesis project, as it existed before the 7th of October 2019.
+All developments since this revision have been tracked in the following project log entries, and are to be considered
+the practical contributions to the thesis project.
+
+In this revision, the system existed as a tool to produce a static website representing the contents of the `mmmfs`
+system in browsable HTML format. The tool had to be run manually after changes, or using a build tool like [`tup`][tup].
+A primitive *Inspector* tab was present in the HTML output and allowed viewing the raw `mmmfs` contents, but all editing
+of content had to be done with external tools and in the external file-system. To see changes in the browser, a
+compilation phase had to be triggered and completed, and consecutively the page reloaded in the browser. There was no
+server-side component that could convert content or store changes for clients. The tool could only accept content from
+the filesystem, not from zip archives or SQLite databases. The conversion algorithm used was more naive and was not
+able to track cost values, which meant that some more advanced conversions couldn't be implemented.
+
+There was already an example implementation of a simple slideshow present, but due to the lack of editing capabilities
+there was no pinwall examle. There was also no support for side- or marginnotes, or academic referencing and citations.
+There also was no support for [`mermaid`][mermaid] diagrams or JSON-encoded data, and there was no plugin interface.
+The HTML template, CSS styling and JS runtime were all built and tracked outside of the `mmmfs` system itself.
+There was no unit tests for any of the project.
+
+[tup]: http://gittup.org/tup/
+[mermaid]: https://mermaidjs.github.io/