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Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

vijayp.dev

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Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#41

Post by masswerk »

What I like to do:

- have HTML files for the individual pages/posts (I like the freedom that custom HTML provides)

- have a script file consisting just of a single array of meta data blocks for the individual posts (headline, description, preview image(s), date, tags, additional assets to load, like additional CSS or JS, if required, restricted visibility, etc. – most of this is optional) and content for the preview

- a server-side template script that generates the chrome around an individual page view and a paginated list view from the feed data (this allows for things like pagination, cross-links, filters per tag, we can generate multiple views), and we can also generate a RRS feed from the feed-index. Moreover, as there is also no external input other than fragments from the request URI, which can be laundered easily (e.g., by discarding all non alpha-numeric characters) and checked for resolving to existing file paths in given constraints, this should be also considerably secure. (This is actually a rather short script.)

- a server config (`.htaccess` or similar) that parses parts of the request URL to parameters to be used by the template script.

(So, adding a post is as simple as adding a new HTML file, copying an entry in the feed file and modifying it accordingly for the new page. And it can be done all in a text editor. The only thing missing may be a full-text search, as there is no DB involved and no representation of the content as normalized plain text. On the other hand, this also keeps the server load low.)

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#42

Post by enmyj »

Lots of people saying they did something similar, so I'll add that I also did something similar for learning / fun(?) with the added wrinkle that it runs on a raspberry pi at my house. I used golang's Fiber to serve the html/css. Fiber comes with some built-in templating as well to help with the layout. https://www.ianmyjer.com/content/homelab.md

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#43

Post by insonable »

There's a lot you can do with just plain html these days if you just need a clean site. Here's an example from my recipe site (https://xilic.com/recipia/sauces/pesto_traditional.html), mostly for my personal use or sharing with friends, with only html/css. It has expandable boxes, a menu system, etc. A simple script converts a directory structure of .csv files to these recipe cards with a template, and this way you can edit the sources in a spreadsheet and then the publish script just takes whatever is new and re-does the whole lot of html as necessary. Just like we used to do with Apache Forest!

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#44

Post by AdrianB1 »

gwynforthewyn wrote: post #5

I decided to do write from scratch for my own site, and found that a real burden was maintaining lists of pages: there was no framework helping me out, and every time I added a new page I had to remember to go update my list of blog posts in the 2 or 3 pages I could access it from. To solve that and other issues, like adding an rss feed and letting pages specify their own publish date, I did what anyone would do: wri…

A few lines of PHP can solve that. The difference to other solutions is you don't have to compile/build/CI-CD it, just copy the PHP files in a folder, change a few things in the ini and you are ready to go.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#45

Post by 8organicbits »

culi wrote: post #24
uncheckederror wrote: post #19

I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS. Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment. Typically, I'll draft…

> Yes, you must copy and paste content Many people who maintain their own sites in vanilla web technologies tend to create reusable functions to handle this for them. It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single page. Though that does kill the "no javascript required" aspect a lot of people like Of course you could simply add a build step to your pure HTML site inste…

I've adopted the idea that a blog post is archived when it's published; I don't want to tinker with it again. Old pages may have an old style, but that's OK, it's an archive. Copy/paste works great for this.

The only reason I use a blog engine now (Hugo) is for RSS. I kept messing up or forgetting manual RSS edits.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#46

Post by NoboruWataya »

azangru wrote: post #23

Did he reinvent a static-site generator? Markdown, pandoc, makefile... Sounds like a job for hugo/eleventy/jekyll/whatever.

I don't maintain a blog so my opinion may not count for much, but I feel like if what you are trying to do doesn't fit neatly into an SSG's existing templates/themes, it may in fact be easier just to use pandoc and some simple tooling around it. Certainly when I looked into a few SSGs for the purpose of making a simple personal website (without a blog) I found I would spend more time trying to bend them to my will than just writing what I want in markdown and running pandoc on it.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#47

Post by tkgally »

lapcat wrote: post #26

I write my website and blog directly and entirely in HTML using BBEdit. For me, this is just much easier than any other method. I don't have to rely on any external system.

Same here. Any text editor would work, of course, but I like BBEdit because of all the customization options. I’ve set up a bunch of shortcuts for frequently used tags; after some practice, I’ve become able to write prose in HTML almost as smoothly as in a word processor.

When I redid my ancient personal site—started in the late 1990s—to make it mobile-friendly a few years ago, BBEdit was also useful when making changes across dozens of files at once.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#48

Post by mixmastamyk »

culi wrote: post #24
uncheckederror wrote: post #19

I've been maintaining my personal website as plain HTML for five years now. I must say, I quite like this method. There's no substitute for practice when it comes to maintaining your skills at editing HTML and CSS. Yes, you must copy and paste content and not having layout page is annoying at times. But the overhead of just doing it yourself is surprisingly small in terms of the time commitment. Typically, I'll draft…

> Yes, you must copy and paste content Many people who maintain their own sites in vanilla web technologies tend to create reusable functions to handle this for them. It can generate headers and the like dynamically so you don't have to change it on every single page. Though that does kill the "no javascript required" aspect a lot of people like Of course you could simply add a build step to your pure HTML site inste…

I recently learned the object tag can do what I wished for in the 90s... work as an include tag:
Turn your back for twenty-five years, and be amazed at what they've come up with! ;-)

Should reduce a lot of boilerplate that would get out of sync on my next project, without need for templating.

Re: Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS

#50

Post by mixmastamyk »

hollowturtle wrote: post #3

Nice job! If only HTML had a serious templating system(no the template tag isn’t enough) that could be used without JavaScript, we won’t need any 3rd party system for assembling static sites. For example a mechanism for including partials with the tag and refer them inside a or directly into current html

I mentioned the object tag elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706227
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