As Static As U Wanna Be

Posted in Anno Domini Thu Sep 12 2024

oh nooooo — oh noooo, what are you doing, web designer? this is cringe! you are going to lose subscriber!

So, for the past however long (Since somewhere in the general vicinity of early 2018? Late 2017? Some shamefully long time, at any rate...) I've been doing this website in what I decided would be the "lazy" way. Which is to say, I knocked up a quick and ugly CSS style sheet and template page, and whenever I wanted to make a new page or article I'd copy-paste that and use a battered old Dreamweaver license as a makeshift WYSIWYG blogging interface. This is a polite way of saying that my "lazy" way was fucking horrifying and an abberation in the eyes of both God and Man for blending the absolute worst of all possible worlds.

What I'm trying to say here is that I've wanted to mash the thing into a Static Site Generator for a while now, so I can post like a Dignified, Respectable Adult without having to worry about the constant security CPR drills and horrific theming systems that go hand in hand with, say, Wordpress or whatever. Every time I've looked at them, though, my brain just kind of falls over and makes a whining noise and then I go off to do something more befitting my intelligence level, like drinking paint. This is because I am demonstrably Too Stupid For Web Development^[1], which sounds like a bad thing, but really, it's actually a blessing. I live in peace and tranquility. The woodland creatures sing to me their loving harmonies, and I rest among the daffodils.

...until one quiet September night, when in the wake of Cohost's violent and entirely-predictable demise^[2], one Mr. Dieting Hippo, Esquire posted a tutorial for something called Eleventy, which a.) has an absolute dogshit website that's poorly written and utterly in love with the idea of making things more complicated than they actually are and b.) somehow aligns with my very specific requirements and/or mental illnesses. I figured I'd give it a quick poke, after all, what's the worst that can happen? I piss around for fifteen minutes and get bored and put it away?

I had the stylesheet and core HTML template ported over in about an hour. The game, as they say, was afoot...

This still isn't nearly done. There are still parts of the site that remain untouched and still use the old """"""system"""""" for now, partially because some of them have kinda weird use cases like combining dynamic lists with external links, but mostly because I haven't gotten around to it yet. On the plus side, that means they should still work fine. Nobody likes broken links, and I've broken enough for one lifetime.

I've had to learn a lot to get this thing working - Eleventy refused to work immediately off the bat without a bunch of messing around in the depths of NPM, and convincing this Markdown footnotes plugin I'm using to function correctly was a real battle, but I'm incredibly proud of how things are turning out even in this primitive, infantile state - it's easier than ever for me to shit out some absolute garbage that's too wordy for Twitter et. al.^[3], and the quality of the resulting code is so much better than it was before^[4].

I've also taken the opportunity to port over a couple of blog and blog-adjacent posts from Cohost and other random places for completion's sake. Just to get a bunch of ramblings in one place while I have the opportunity. Oh, also, I have an RSS feed, so you'll still be able to hear from me once the final satellites fall from the sky and we all have to trudge back to forums and BBSes and shit. Maybe I should set up a mailing list, but that opens a whole bag of Privacy Stuff that I really don't wanna be deal with at the moment...

As for things I still want/need to do: My learning all I can and, realistically, will learn about web design and development occured about five seconds before the invention of responsive design. My old attempt at hacking phone support into my design completely broke with the transition to the new system, resulting in a lot of pulled hair and not a lot of sleep. I managed to figure out a solution that works pretty good, but will be an absolute pain in the ass to support. Better things are (probably) possible, but I'll have to corner someone who knows WTF they're doing to figure it out.

Oh, also: I wanna sort out some fancy Javascript lightbox thing that doesn't have a zillion dependencies to implement. You might notice some pages are missing from the front page. They're either old and not hugely relevant anymore or they need a complete overhaul involving a nice lightbox gallery thing. They're still online with their old code, so I'm not burning too much of the Library of Alexandria. They'll be back properly at... some point, I guess?

Please let me know via e-mail or one of the surviving social media things if there's any bugs or anything else I should implement! I've tried my best to keep links the same and avoid breaking too much, but I'm sure I've fucked up on at least one point. Let me know what that point is!

I did a web development course many years ago, just before HTML5 reared its ugly head. So much PHP. I barely escaped with my scholastic life. ↩︎
For those coming here years later who don't know what Cohost was -- imagine Tumblr, but invite-only, minus 90% of the features, and the developers abandoned it for like a full year to focus their efforts on failing to launch a bad clone of Venmo. ↩︎
For those coming here years later who don't know what Twitter was -- imagine texting the entire planet on a phone borrowed from a succession of increasingly surrealistic oligarchs. ↩︎
Hey, you see that image with a caption next to it up there? That's a pretty simple <figure> setup now. Beforehand, it was a fuckin' table! Yeah, yeah, I know... ↩︎