 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. 27 comments
@spiralganglion 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. @neauoire @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! @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. @neauoire @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.   @neauoire 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!" @neauoire 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.    @neauoire 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 :~ @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. @neauoire 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 :> @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. @kototama @cblgh I used to do all the templating in a little lisp  @neauoire 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.  @neauoire 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. |
Gregory's Server
@neauoire I'd be curious to hear how you personally handle stuff that's shared between pages, like nav. Build step for that? Manually duplicate?