On almost every blog – if the author is a technical person – you will find an article in which the author describes how they build the website.¹ In each such article, the author first describes the state of the world of website generators. They then explain why none of the existing solutions are good and why they have to code their own generator in their favorite esolang. The more complicated/artisanal the resulting system, the higher the chance that the blog consists of just this article.
I decided to take a different path. Every blog post I write is a self-standing website with its own stylesheet, fonts, etc. (If I understand web technologies correctly, this is not an optimal solution, because the browser has to download these materials again when opening each blog post.) This means that:
- I can tailor the look of the blog post to its topic. My short text about the Glagolitic script uses a modified version of LaTeX.css, so it (sort of) looks like an academic article.
- The blog posts are immune to my constant fiddling with CSS. (Too often I see older articles on newly redesigned blogs to which new CSS has been applied incorrectly.)
- I can create the HTML in different ways. The HTML of this post is hand-written. Sometimes I use Pandoc to generate it from a more palatable markup language.
After I have a blog post written, I add it to the index, and I upload all the new and changed files to my web hosting over FTP. Running a website is quite simple nowadays.
- This is one of those articles.