Very often I see aspiring website authors quickly make life complicated for themselves by deciding they need a blog, which then leads to numerous questions about tools and processes that can easily draw anyone into busywork. That time could otherwise have been spent on actually writing posts, articles, games, demos, etc. for their website that one can look back with joy months or years later.
Website busywork is probably fine for people who genuinely want to spend their time thinking about tools and processes. But if you just want to put your thoughts out there, it can be more fruitful to simply publish HTML, written directly or converted from your favourite text format such Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.
This is a topic I care about quite a bit and my complete thoughts about this would be too long for an HN comment, so I will just share a link to a post I wrote about this recently, in case someone finds value in it: https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html
I would genuinely like to see more personal websites, because they make the Web more diverse and more interesting.
edit... Ironically, I just clicked "All Articles" on his home page and it's a chronological blog... At least there is some curation to it.
When I next start a website I'm just going to channel my old Geocities days.
edit: Easter egg! https://www.google.com/search?q=geocities
But indeed, a loose collection of simple pages is better than nothing at all...
You are completely right, just write the damn thing and the blog can come later.
I literally laughed out loud. This is so on point, and so is the rest of the article.
Give me simple instructions about that stuff prior to creating the contents and id be happy.
Armed with a CD copy of the web site, I moved it over to my hosted space. I setup password-access, and setup the syuidy group, and from there on, I frequently put in one-liner paragraphs from the professor, she sometimes managed to get them to me soon enough that I could put them in before class started that day.
My answer is usually that you can write whatever you want on your websites. It's yours after all. None of the limitations that exist on third-party platforms exist. You can make all the pages read upside down if you want to.
No, you need less than that! :-)
┍━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┑
│ how-to-make-a-damn-website.html │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title> │
│ <h1>How to Make a Damn Website</h1> │
│ │
│ │
│ <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start │
│ or they get stuck.</p> │
┕━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┙
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Hello</title>
<body>
<p>Hello!
$ tidy -qe minimal.html
$
So I guess smallest without errors should be
<!DOCTYPE html><title>a</title>
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang><title>a</title>
<!DOCTYPE html><html lang><title>a</title><p>aJust lists of title, pic, blurb, url
E.g. the section covering RSS for your post is longer than the section covering HTML, you don't really need a fixed structure, and you don't need to think of a story to write unless that's what you want to do. You can just post a picture of your cat and try to add googly eyes later if that's what floats your boat. Or just "Hello World" and let your mind go from there.
That is when I bring out the expanded form of 'blog' in all its glory. It is my weblog. Of course I am going to log whatever I want for myself, regardless of whether it is interesting to others. I do not need to subscribe to someone else's notion of what is interesting in order to decide what belongs on my own weblog.
Doesn't take much.
WordPress was a technical mess before their founder had a psychotic break and their company posted features advocating for business owners to put bait-and-switch AI slop on their websites.