If you're reading this then I actually published a new web site. For years I've been meaning to update my web site, but the options are endless. There are lots of static site generators that seem really neat, but whenever I try them I end up spending a lot of time tweaking and customizing them. What I intended as a writing or at most deployment exercise turns into software engineering - which I love doing - but it never ships.
I had the realization the other day that instead of a static site generator, I could write a static site.
I know HTML. When I've tried SSGs I'm frustrated by their imprecise and
inflexible translation from Markdown or whatever into actual HTML. I
prefer writing <i>foo</i> than
*foo* because it's clearer and less ambiguous. Writing
Markdown I invariably find myself what the rendered output looks like
(at least in a browser, if not reading the source) to make sure that my
I've expressed my intentions correctly. There are some sharper edges -
I'll have to write &
if I want an ampersand, but I think I can manage.
While I'm planning to write the content directly into HTML files, it makes sense to have tools to check for mistakes, help me write the content, and even perhaps generate other representations of it. For example, if I decide to publish an RSS or Atom feed I could generate that from the HTML files and commit history. But I think I'll check all of that in - so that what's under source control is what's served.
I also don't object to dynamic content. I might find it useful to use JS, even with some server-side code to enhance things. But this will all be enhancements. It'll be out of the path of me sitting down to write some words.
This might change over time and I'll aim to keep it up to date - mostly so I can remember what I've done.
I'm using Visual Studio Code on my laptop to write the site. If I edit it server-side I'll probably use Vim. They're both good for editing HTML, with syntax highlighting to keep me from making the stupidest mistakes. There's even a decent spell checker for VSCode.
When I'm editing locally I preview my changes in a browser with
python3 -m http.server. I have a script in
scripts/fixup.py that currently just makes sure that the
<footer> block is consistent across all pages.
I'm storing the content in Git, using Sourcehut for my source of truth repo. I'm hosting the actual site on a VM I keep running in Google Cloud. It's static, so I'm tempted to look at some specialized static site serving, perhaps deploying automatically on a commit hook, but that's the kind of thinking that stops me actually shipping a new site.
This is sort of a to-do list. Or at least a to-investigate list.