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I see lots of folks building websites who go straight to adding build steps and markdown-to-html parsers to their website, half of those get stranded in toolchain hell in the process.

Here's an alternative that's often overlooked: Make writing html comfortable, it'll delay the need for a complex build step. It might not work for all cases, but it might help a handful few.

in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Ivan Reese
Ivan Reese
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I'd be curious to hear how you personally handle stuff that's shared between pages, like nav. Build step for that? Manually duplicate?
in reply to Ivan Reese

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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that's situation specific, and per-person's abilities specific. But, if I had 10 pages? I'd copy/paste the header/footer, or use a frame.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

pvh
pvh
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@spiralganglion we started with the former but the maintenance of the shared elements of raw HTML became problematic over time and we landed on an annoying markdown-to-html toolchain. There are lots of benefits to both!
@Ivan Reese
in reply to pvh

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@pvh @spiralganglion Yeah, I'm not saying this scales or is a silver bullet, but there's a threshold where the scaffolding for hosting very little content gets in the way, especially at the start when someone is creating their personal website from the ground up.
@pvh @Ivan Reese
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

pvh
pvh
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@spiralganglion the really nice thing about PHP was that it had a great transition from "just plain HTML" to more complex stuff. I miss that.
@Ivan Reese
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Tomáš
Tomáš
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This is so good. Gives me an idea of implementing something similar like this in ratpoison's prompt....

thanks :flan_aww:

Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@crash I'm not sure that having UX consistency has anything to do with brands but I'm glad you found something that works 😀 And yes, if anything, per-project navigation tends to make things more exciting too!
@sib crash
Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@jameschip Once your website is in plain html, you won't have to rewrite it again. 😀 You can carry these source documents around without having to change them in any way between iteration of the website.
@James Chip
Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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I think it might be a mistake to assume that readers don't perceive or benefit from UX decisions. But I understand what you're trying to say. You mean a cookie-cutter experience.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@crash for sure!
@sib crash
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Ed Davies
Ed Davies
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I used to write direct HTML for all my pages, just starting with a template page for stylesheet inclusion, headers and footers, etc. When I went over to mostly posting to my blog I wrote a site-building system to do things like the next and prev links in the blog pages, the index pages and the Atom feed.

But, I still write the actual content of the pages directly as HTML. I use the Geany editor which at least adds the closing tags to elements. I also have a separate little program which resizes images and generates the anchor and img elements so people can click for a bigger view of JPGs but other than that help I don't find just writing HTML to be the problem creating pages.

in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

akavel
akavel
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@jameschip I like an idea demonstrated by https://soupault.app - basically, it's an HTML manipulator app, which can also let you plug in some "input transformers", for example if you want to preprocess some .md files into .html to make them "usable". That said, I had some issues with the particular implementation, so, obviously I'm now Writing My Own "Minimal" SSG™ to make that work for me (FWIW, https://github.com/akavel/scribbles).

GitHub - akavel/scribbles

Contribute to akavel/scribbles development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
@James Chip
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

🍉 estoy desesperada 🍉
🍉 estoy desesperada 🍉
• •

a few versions ago I decided to make my site gemini-first. the hardest and most time consuming part was making it web accessible, there's still stuff I'm polishing now even. its a lot to bite off and I was already many many website versions in before I even attempted it.

gemini is nice because it reminds me of how simple things could be while I pile on amusing complexity :ablobcatbongokeyboard:

in reply to 🍉 estoy desesperada 🍉

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@mapachin making gemtext web accessible was hard? What happened, like what tripped you? I would have thought that going from it to html might be pretty straight-forward since gemtext has no AST.
@🍉 estoy desesperada 🍉
Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@zens @pvh @spiralganglion Am I the only one who sees a broken doctype tag on this page?
@pvh @Ivan Reese
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Hippo 🍉
Hippo 🍉
• •

this is cool! My first website was hand-coded in HTML, and I think it's the best way to be comfortable with the process even if you decide to use annoying build steps later.

At least you'll have a handle on what all those parsers are *doing* and the confidence to step in and say "Back off buddy, we're going to handle this part MY way!"

in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

wvs
wvs
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I grew to like markdeep (https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/) until I can escape POSIX full-stack for something #FORTH -ish, but I also seemingly care less and less about scalability anymore as I long for decentralized/self-hosted/bespoke or whatever.

Markdeep

casual-effects.com
#forth
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Tendigits
Tendigits
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this choice works really well for me. It’s so easy to just concatenate files together. Do nothing site builder.
Unknown parent

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@babouille a webring? I do have a webring, what part of a webring makes the maintenance needs increase?
@Fanny Matrice
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Alexander Cobleigh
Alexander Cobleigh
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how long have you been using this type of facility for your sites? seems like this would be quite specific to the current edition of left, but maybe i am mistaken :~
in reply to Alexander Cobleigh

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@cblgh maybe 4 or 5 years, when I moved away from the lisp parser in JS and rewrote it in html, I stuck to plain html source files. I've had this sort of little gizmo in left from the beginning, even back when it was written in C.
@Alexander Cobleigh
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Alexander Cobleigh
Alexander Cobleigh
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hehe i was thinkin of electron left X) but cool to hear you've been using it for such a long time! love finding out these little personal tricks we all have but seldom speak of :>
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Alexander Cobleigh

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
• •
@cblgh I guess I stole it from some other application but I can't remember which. When I first started doing it, I remember I saw a text-editor that let you type like TODAY, and it would insert today's date in its place. It might have been micro, or one of those. Being able to inject entire files in place is pretty useful! It's one of those things that everyone does, but it's only seldom talked about.
@Alexander Cobleigh
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Caffeine’s Heir
Caffeine’s Heir
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this is the path I'm going through right now, cleaning up ugly markdown-generated files into simple HTML files to use as a source. It's so liberating.
Unknown parent

Fanny Matrice
Fanny Matrice
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like, you seriously never had this problem ?
in reply to Fanny Matrice

Devine Lu Linvega
Devine Lu Linvega
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@babouille No, I guess not, but we kept the webring page really straight forward.
@Fanny Matrice
in reply to Devine Lu Linvega

Diego F. Goberna
Diego F. Goberna
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completely agree. You don't even need that help. Dammit, html is not black magic, and it's not a blocker/time sink. Write html/css/js manually and from scratch, for small-medium websites is more than enough.

Templates for headers/footers/x? If you can program, a basic generator without dependencies will take you one morning/day, and it will be simple enough that won't add much maintenance penalty for the future.

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