HTML Only

My site is now an HTML & CSS website, just like the old days. I've had a blast rebuilding it in this way. The approachability of making updates to the site is off the charts, and the speed that it is served by GitHub Pages makes me smile. For some reason it's just more fun to make this sort of site in HTML & CSS.

At the moment it is pretty simple to make updates, but there is sort of a checklist of things to remember. I'll use this post as an example of how I go about adding a new post to the site:

• Create a new folder ./blog/2022/HTML-only
• Create an index.html file in that new folder (I do it this way so that the URL will be a nice bjhess.com/blog/2022/HTML-only/)
  
• Copy the HTML code from ./blog/template.html
• Replace the title and date provided by the template
• Open the new file in the SeaMonkey browser
• Click File > Edit Page (⌘E on macOS)
• Write my post and save it

There! I wrote a post! But more to do:

• Add a link to the post in ./blog/index.html
• Add a new entry to ./blog/feed.xml and refresh the updated date on the feed
• Add the changes to the git repository and push to github

A few minutes later the post is live and the RSS feed is up to date. Not bad!

Is it annoying to have to manually update things like the blog index and the RSS feed? Typo-wise, yes, it is easy to make a mistake. Time-wise, I haven't found it to be a bother as of yet.

While it is a little more time consuming working in code this way, it's at least consistent. When I'm working in a software like Micro.blog, I'm usually writing in Markdown, but sometimes I need to bring in HTML code anyway, and it gets confusing. Then if I'm making tweaks to the design, I have to go do that in a different webform while also maintaining a change history in a separate file in git. When I change CSS in blog software it might take effect instantly, or it might not. The particular CSS I'm changing might work just fine, or it might need an !important tacked on to it to work.

I might drop the SeaMonkey editing at some point. It's kind of nice to have a WYSIWYG editor for this, but it also adds some junk to the HTML at times. Maybe I can learn to not worry about that junk.

I might write some scripts to automate things as I go. At that point am I just making my own static site generator? I don't think so, but maybe. (I did some scripting to convert the blog posts from my old site, which were dumped to HTML, into static files for the new site. I might also do this to convert Intense Debate comments over to static comments so those don't get lost down the road.)

Here's more on why I went HTML only.