*this (2025-02-13)
Naturally I devote the first blog post to the creation of this website.
Motivation
The motivation came of course from frustration with modern sites and a bit of nostalgia. But mainly I wanted the now() and the about() pages. They provide me with a public place to document what I’m on and what I believe and give me a corrective. I can’t remember where I read about it the first time, but I thought the idea was neat. Especially as more of a private person, it motivates me to keep going with things when I imagine people reading this.
The design of this page is as bad as it is, because for once, it was
the style at the time (be happy I don’t include a
<marquee> tag. Worst loss of the net…) and secondly:
I just suck at it. Deal with it :)
Having programmed some time with modern JS/TS frameworks I’m a stark oppponent of this whole technology stack. It just adds - layers and layers - of - complexity over complexity - nobody ever got any chance to understand. That’s why I simply want a plain html+css website, suppported by some GNU programs.
Technical details
You can find the whole source code of this in my git(). Beside
HTML+CSS I wanted some kind of template mechanism, but didn’t want it to
be utterly complex. So I use cat, make to glue
everything together and pandoc to translate Markdown to
HTML for this blog, because HTML is not too fun to write.
Building a page
To start the template I have a start.html which contains
everything from the start <html> tag, the whole
<head> and the start <body> tag.
Then the nav.html and side.html are included
with navigation and sidebar . Afterwards the actual
<article> gets included and everything is closed
inside end.html.
So for example the index.html page is built using
cat start.html nav.html side.html index.html end.html
Same applies to every other page.
Automating using make
I automated this for a whole folder using a Makefile on which I don’t want to elaborate too much, it’s just a “simple” Makefile. Makefiles are always simple when you start out and keep getting more cryptic as more as you work on it.
Blog
Since I’m not that much of a fan of writing HTML all the time, but
think Markdown is not that bad, I decided to use it for this blog. I
write these posts as .md pages and convert them using pandoc with
pandoc -f markdown -t html *.md -o blog.html. All of this
also automated using markdown.
Future Work
Blog paging
I’m pretty sure this is simple for the moment but if I add more and more content here it will become confusing. I will need some paging mechanism and at one point maybe a search. But until I decide it is the time, I will just ignore it for now.
Marquee tag
Just joking it died with Internet Explorer and never was standardized!
References
I think I need some reference mechanism, to easilier include them, such that it is not that much of a hazzle.