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A shift to independent publishing is needed. I used to have sites that died because the upkeep became tiresome, and if - a professional developer with almost 25
by PaulRobinson 7y ago
A shift to independent publishing is needed. I used to have sites that died because the upkeep became tiresome, and if - a professional developer with almost 25 years experience of writing web applications - find it tiresome, can we blame people for wanting to use the big platforms?
I think using a static site generator might be OK. Common headers and footers help, and RSS might definitely be a good thing, but that seems to be dying.
One idea from this article I liked was "one page, over many". I don't think he meant have one single page on your website, but rather one per directory, and like he has with this article have one directory for a thought or essay or piece of something you want documenting, and just have an index.html in it.
I like this because I think the one thing that has killed off most personal websites is not the tech tool chain, but that "blogging" created an expectation of everybody becoming a constant content creator. The pressure to create content and for it to potentially "go viral" is one of several reasons I just tore down several sites over the years.
Around this time of year I take a break from work and think about my various side projects, and sometimes think about "starting a blog again". I often spend a few hours fiddling with Jekyll or Hugo, both good tools. Then I sit and think about the relentless pressure to add content to this "thing".
I like this idea instead though. No blogs. No constant "hot takes" or pressure to produce content all the time. Just build a slowly growing, curated, hand-rolled website.
I still think there might be a utility in having a static site build flow with a template function, but a simple enough design could be updated with nothing more than CSS.
Bit to think about, here... interesting.
- lunchables 7y agoI use a combination of asciidoc and hugo to generate my static website. It means that I can easily regenerate the website using whatever tool I want in the future or even just easily update the template for the existing site. If something happens to asciidoc, there are lots of converters that would allow me to move to another format or presumably some format in the future. Markdown and restructuretext are also really good options.