about making a website

the thing about making a website is at some point you have to actually make things that go on the website. i feel like this is where i stumble on every attempted project, where setting up scaffolding and other stuff is more exciting than actually using any of it to do anything. but lots of people post-cohost have their own thing and i want to get in on the action if i can, even if it's well past the zeitgeist at this point. i could have maybe got up and running with some off the shelf software or pre-hosted thing faster, but i already have this setup i like on a server i fully control. i tried a couple static site generators for this, like hugo, but honestly their complexity seems to far outweigh their usefulness for my purposes. plus the results just look way too professional. i'm going to try and keep things as javascript-free as possible around here, although there'll be some inevitable embedded stuff. maybe there'll be some dynamic things as well to support comments or h-entries or webmentions or what have you. i haven't really thought that through yet.

as for what i have actually works: each post comes in a fragment file with a title and the body. there's then a few small go programs that take that and use templates to generate the actual html pages, plus an rss feed. to handle the actual generation of the site we've got... make. yep, good ol' make. nothing beats that. hopefully there aren't too many generation disasters. and the whole thing is hosted on apache, because i like it. i haven't totally figured out everything i want to even put on here; i'd like to have an easier way to share code that's less manual than pasting things into codehost and less heavyweight than self-hosted gitea or something like that. and i definitely need an 88x31, and to collect other 88x31 to have a friends of the site page. i guess that's part of the fun of having a website, is that you never really run out of things to fiddle with.