So, I finally said fuck it and stopped coding the website with pure HTML.
Honestly, the decision was a MUCH better idea than just keep going with what I’ve been doing mainly for a couple reasons.
Let’s tackle this one point at a time.
If you looked at the code for the previous version, it’s… something alright.
CSS Flex was a hard thing to manage and I went with a method that did work but was very finicky. Finicky as in I had to make sure everything was at a specific size or else nothing would actually work and it would just kinda break. I did figure it out, but again, that took a long time.
It feels like I’m kinda stuck between the stuff I learned when HTML5 was barely a thing and modern HTML.
And don’t get me started on the first version of the site, I miss the render sitting on the front page, but dear god that was a mess to set up. and worse was that version didn’t really have any good coding to support a blog, mainly in the aesthetics, which is why I made the switch in the first place.
Also, typing in HTML just kinda feels bleh, like, it’s mostly the same, but adding tags to bold or italics text was tedious as hell, and god forbid I do something that requires CSS changes.
I also had a lot of things that needed to be manually updated, which leads me to my next point.
The thing with making a blog with no backend is that you need to update a lot of things. Like for example, next and previous buttons. You’d have to remember what the last post is then go into that post and update the anchor tag to include the link in that version, then you go to the original file then update the previous tag to point to THAT previous post and it just felt really time-consuming.
That’s not the only thing, there was the blog archive that I needed to add new entries to, manually, and there was the front page where I have to update the recent posts, manually.
And god forbid I make a slight change that isn’t in the CSS, because that means I have to update that shit for EVERY SINGLE PAGE, genuintely felt like a nightmare.
The only things I had in the second version was an archive and next and previous buttons, but like, that’s not enough, there would also need to be tags to link up things that are similar in topic and in the backend a much easier way to manage these posts, which really didn’t feel like that in the old version. Could I manage without those? Maybe, but I want them dammit.
So, what did I end up doing for this? Well, I’m now using a static site generator known as Hugo, and my god, this is so much easier to manage. Let’s go over how my site was improved by this.
With Hugo, everything is written with Markdown, the advantage with this is that I don’t have to do much in the ways of typing tags or some shit, I just… write. If I wanted to bold some text, well it’s as easy as using ** around some text. If you used discord’s text markdown, it’s based on this, and my god, I’m so happy.
There’s also the fact that it automatically updates all the shit I needed to manually update, and more.
With Hugo, it automatically generates lists of posts in a certain folder if it doesn’t have an index page. This is useful for having a blog, since it automatically updates the relevant pages with new posts, making it much easier to actually maintain a bunch of posts. Hell, I don’t even have to update the Next Previous indicators, they’re just there now.
Now that I have the whole tags and easier to write text, this feels more like a thing I can just open, write a bunch of shit down, publish it, and be done with it, and that just genuinely feels nice. Like, there’s a couple nitpicks I have, but they don’t really matter in the longrun. I’m just happy with working with this now.
I do plan on going through pages and fixing errors and spelling mistakes and such, so the site should be in a much better state after this update.
Also, I changed the WEB3 web button to one about Hugo, mainly because I wanted to have a “Powered by Hugo” type thing on my website, but also WEB3 is fucking dead lmao #ripbozo.