This post is a reply to this article by Louie Mantia, go check his website out, it's really cool!
This is my first reply post! 🎉 How exciting!!
TLDR; for those that don't want to go read it:
To make a damn website, you write html, css, and your rss feed manually. Repeat stuff on different pages. All manual.
So that's what I did! This website is now fully static and only using html files.
I would just like to add my opinion after trying this approach to nuance Louie's article a bit.
First of all, I think that making a website with html is a great idea, especially for a personal website. It's super easy to ship and to change stuff, you don't spend any time configuring things or stuck in dependency hell 🔥.
I feel like I've finally gotten close again to the publishing power I had with my .txt only website but with the added bonus of accessibility!
This approach brings one problem though, writing html sucks ass. When I'm writing a post, I don't want to have to think about tags and semantics. I want to write words and be able to scan them quickly without tags and attributes getting in the way.
Also, it's absolute hell on mobile (though you might be aided by a tool like James' mobile first html editor). I don't want to have to go in the keyboard behind the keyboard and type all the symbols necessary for a html tag. And I write a LOT on my phone because I don't always have my computer on me when I have the time to write.
So the solution I've found to this problem is to write my files in markdown1 (using Obsidian) and simply parse them using a tool like this PHP Markdown Dingus2 and then copy them inside my html files.
This way I can write both on my phone and my computer without being distracted by having to think about correct html.
Apart from that tiny caveat, I encourage everyone to start building their own website, it's so much fun and actually really easy once you've gone through the deployment phase.
If you have a personal website, feel free to share it with me! I'd be more than pleased to have a look :))
But it could also be txt or whatever you want that doesn't have a terse syntax. ↩
I've personally built a tiny app (with PHPNative) that adds a global shortcut that uses ParsedownExtra to convert my markdown. ↩