I find it oddly relaxing to write things in raw HTML5 again. 🤓

I haven't done it since I built the "retro remake" of Bob's Tech Site last year (although that was deliberately meant to be terrible as I was using new tech to recreate old tech)

Here's a preview of what's coming. This page lists blog posts in date order. The home page will be curated into four columns for announcements, tutorials, experiments & opinions that look a little like the feeds in Mastodon with styled <hr> tags

The general premise is to avoid all server-side and client-side scripting.

The only external dependencies are CSS stylesheets and the XML file for RSS, but as they're also handwritten the file footprints are tiny.

The other cool thing is having full control over image files. This makes a lot of things easier, not least of which is not having to deal with wonky resize scripts or browser-based cropping tools.

There are trade-offs. For example if I want to change the navigation bar I have to copy it across a crazy number of files.

However, as this only happens rarely and takes less time than trying to convince nginx, ghost's CLI and NPM to play nicely when there's an update that breaks something I figure it's still worthwhile.

@bobstechsite are you hand writing the whole thing?

If you're not using a generator, maybe have a pretender with HEADER HERE placeholder and a build script of some sort.

A few lines of python to replace it all with header and footer content from files should work.

@sansone indeed. @frostotron suggested a similar idea.

Atm it's all handwritten. But once I start adding the blog content there'll be hundreds of pages. So creating some kind of build script does seem a sensible way to make this scale a bit better 🙂