This is a brief manual of how to write and publish pages on this website. It's mainly documentation for my future self, but may also be interesting to people who'd like to set up their own website without content management system (CMS), static site generator (SSG), or blogging platform.
All pages on this website are hand-written HTML documents.
HTML is the markup language of the web: understood by all browsers without any preprocessing.
You might ask whether it isn't incredibly tedious to write HTML markup, but if you write HTML right, you'll be surprised how readable it can be.
Hit Ctrl-u and check out the source code of this page, for example!
The boilerplate necessary for each page is stored in a template file, that is, stuff like the viewport meta tag, a link to my style sheet and a hyperlink back to the home page.
When I start a new page, I copy that file and replace the title.
I got a little script to make my life easier, but it could be done manually just as well.
To create this post, I ran ./new "How This Website Works", which
index.html, replacing the title placeholder with the actual title, and
/22/09/27/ with the given title to the home page.
The subdirectory is the final identifier of the page. I intentionally don't use the title for naming the file, as it might change during the writing process or even after publication. Creating a subdirectory instead of just a year-month-day file has the advantage that you can keep additional files for the page (images, style sheets, subpages, etc.) in there. Also, if you write a lot and over several years, thousands of flat files might cause you problems at some point, depending on your file system. As you may have noticed, this is not one of my concerns, unfortunately.
I keep a versioned history of this website in a private GitHub repository.
However, I don't bother with commit messages.
I got another small script ./push that stages whatever changes are there and pushes them with the generic message Update
.
If the repository was public, this push could also automatically publish the website via GitHub Pages, but I prefer to keep my files private and decide when to publish what by linking or not linking from home or some other page.
Instead, I deploy the site via Netlify's free starter plan on a domain I bought via Namecheap.
Netlify has its own command-line interface, which makes the deployment as simple as netlify deploy.
That's really all there is to this website, technically.
Update: I added some tags to the home page. They can be used to filter the list of articles.