No longer writing my own damn HTML
claytonwramsey.com
No longer writing my own damn HTML
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#2I’ve felt the pain
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#3The big problem was not wanting to write even a small amount of is.
After all, a simple web component in a page of code would have allowed client side includes.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#4Honestly, I thought this was going to be another AI post. TIL about zola. Looks cool.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#5The big problem was not wanting to write even a small amount of is. After all, a simple web component in a page of code would have allowed client side includes.
I did think about that! However, I didn't like the idea of making the client side do work to make up for my own poorly-managed website. Forcing users to run code just to render some boring text seems like a waste.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#6I run my personal site off of Hugo. You can load some decent themes and adding new content is a relatively painless process.
But I do feel like there is a cost to using static site generators. Raw HTML is easier to work with if you aren't dealing with a lot of similar pages.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#7After many iterations of tools, systems, and processes, I have settled on writing in plain text, in Markdown, to identify headings, paragraphs, quotes, images, etc.
My reasoning and approach is that I or someone should be able to read it as it is and then have a tool parse it to spit out HTML for browsers, helping others read it with a better experience.
With thousands of posts, it would be complex for me to maintain them in HTML. Now, my blog is powered by Jekyll because of GitHub pages. However, I can quickly switch to any other tool with minor tweaks.
Locally, I see my blog posts as individual files with dates `YYYY-MM-DD` and the title in their yearly folder `YYYY`. Some are in `WIP`, which I can continue to update/write. The `future` folder contains the ones that are drafts, but I can see them and don't mind if someone stumbles on them. Always a work in progress and am even aiming to simplify it further.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#8God on Clayton to publish his thoughts on his own blog!
That said, he's throwing the baby out with the bath water and making convoluted claims. I agree with some of them, but I'll exercise my desire to write more and reply:
> My hope is that I’ll take advantage of this and start writing more!
Choosing to self-publish one's blog is already at odds with "I'm doing this to write more". So blaming handwritten HTML for added friction is not so fair.
Literally writing every single page of HTML is unnecessarily strict. As another commenter mentions, why not add a few client-side templates for header/footer, a global nav etc.
Jekyll is really not a very ergonomic static site generator. I got GitHub famous for a hot-second because I wrote a little framework to help: https://github.com/jekyllbootstrap. TLDR: Jekyll is famous because the cofounder of GitHub made it. Not really because it's the best or even a good implementation. It's neat, it's just, why would you use that if you have access to a fully ruby runtime.
Anyway, I love hand-writing HTML so my bias out. I don't think it's HTML's fault. HTML is super easy to write, as OP agrees.
I made my own little website framework (of course); it's not ready for prime-time but you can peruse here: https://plusjade.com/demos/index.html
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#9I can definitely relate to building towards an easier "write -> publish" workflow. My old site is still running WordPress but I just got frustrated with the overall feeling of oppressive heaviness to the whole framework (no shade on WP, I still really like it).
I switched over to a similar process but opted for Pelican (since I'm more familiar with Python vs Rust) which builds directly off my markdown notes in Obsidian so it's relatively WYSIWYG. Much easier to maintain and Github Actions automatically handle updates.
Re: No longer writing my own damn HTML
#10I have always written my own static blog generator, moving from PERL to Ruby and most recently Python. I find the other blog systems are too complicated for what I want. Plus, I think I like writing the generator more than writing actual posts.