In the past I've used several blog engines, CMS, and rolled my own solutions, but at the end of the day, I find writing simple html is faster and easier than using a blog engine. A blog engine or CMS makes you dependant on other softwareand may no longer exist or be obsolete in a couple of years. Plus you usually have to hack the html and css of these engines to get what you want anyway, which defeats their purpose.
After playing with 8 bit computers, my IT career debuted writing invoicing applications using Multiplan on MS-DOS, so plain text has a nostalgic pull for me. Searching for a reasonable solution, I looked at Gopher and Gemini.
Both are nice although Gopher is old and quirky and Gemini still a bit experimental, but the fundemental problem is that they both require specific browsers, html bridges or plugins to be viewed, limiting their use and content availability to a few initiates, and I really mean a few. Lets face it, the www is the common denominator today.
Ok, you can't put the djinn back in the bottle. You can do a load of stupid stuff with a web site, and there are billions of them out there producing carbon, wasting energy, and displaying a marked lack of content behind a show of technological sleight of hand.
Instead, the onus is on you to write a universally readable web site, not on the reader to posess the right browser.
Of course, you can't force people to be responsible, and major search engines don't offer to filter out crap websites. In the mean time, I'll practice what I preach.
So here's a blog with articles that just uses simple html. There are no Javascript, grids, or fancy formats. Articles are plain html and can be read in a terminal text browser like Lynx, or a simple browser graphical browser like Dillo, or a state of the art browser like Firefox.
The only extras are the use of some basic css for browsers that can use it, and UTF-8 character encoding rather than ASCII. Behind the scenes there's some PHP for generating article listings and search, and a couple of bash scripts to edit new articles and upload them. I think this arrangement will be pretty future resistant.
You can download the scripts here
A Google only web is on the horizon. Let them have it. Instead let's go back to enjoying a fast, pertinent, content-rich space where you are not the product.
For info, I use Librewolf, a more secure version of Firefox, and Chawan, perhaps the best terminal web browser to date.
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