if this worked then [muffet] should now only update the pages that have actually changed since the last time it has run. preliminary tests are hopeful, but adding this and seeing if it has the most recent creation date and nothing else will be the final confirmation i need. once this is in place i'll be able to move on to the next stage. i know you won't see this for a couple days. such is the way of things when nothing goes the way it should. sigh
edit: well, i was a bit overly optimistic about how minimal the effects of adding a single item are. for example, this page's body minimally updates muffet's page due to the new reference it adds to muffet. additionally it's existance as a feed entry changes [feed], as well as changes [tagrank] because the tag counts change. more damning it changes all it's siblings in the hierarchy as it changes their menu items. but the good news is it does limit the number of files updated substantially. a nice sideeffect of this is the static generation itself is much faster than previously. This is because I am now using a ramfs to build the final page rather than writing it straight to disk, so it only writes to disk the changed pages. but realistically compared to the network transfer of even a few files updates are going to take longer in general, like 5 minutes? (hopefully this isn't baseless optimism, and is instead gross exageration)