Re: Is making a bare-bones blog with just HTML/CSS possible?
Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2019 9:58 am
Of course you can do it all by hand, but aren't computers just there to relieve us of such repetitive work? And maybe it will be nice, later on, to be able to display the posts sorted not only by date, but also by topic (or categories). Maybe you want to add images later on, with automatic thumbnails; maybe you don't want to write your posts all in HTML, but use a simpler markup language like Markdown or Textile. Perhaps you want to add a RSS feed so people can subscribe to your blog with their feed reader.MosesKhan wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:47 am I've actually made a very basic version of what I want using premade html and CSS and then editing it but I'm still somewhat lost and am not even sure if using just those two things can even make a blog.
I'm going for a super bare-bones, simple blog, with a home page showing my latest post(s) in full, and then an archive page showing links/titles of all past blog posts in chronological order (and then you can go to a page of one of them).
Is this even possible with just HTML/CSS? Could I add new blog posts with ease? It seems that all I'd have to do with each new one is to go into the code and simply add my text to the home page + create a new page for said post + add link to said page in my archives page.
I don't consider it very professional to create and update blog posts, your start page and your archives all by hand; every time you add a post you'll have to copy it (or include it) on your start page, remove the oldest one from there and add it to your archive page. That's a lot of dull, error-prone work and not much fun.MosesKhan wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:47 amI don't want to use a blog publishing service because it just looks too flashy for me and seems less professional to me than a simple homemade site. I don't like the scrolling and images and flashiness of those sites (however they're still great).
Whether your site is "flashy" with lot's of images or you rather like a clean, minimal design is up to you and not determined by your use (or non-use) of a blog engine; you can create very flashy pages by hand, and you can use a clean, minimal theme on a blog engine. The ss9y standard theme, 2k11, even is quite minimal, see here, for example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7p5s0mmpi8iwn ... 4.png?dl=0 or here: https://www.onli-blogging.de/.
There are even (at least) to ways to create a blog (or website) supported by an engine. One way is to use a blog engine or a CMS (content management system) that will create your pages on the fly, using a server-side scripting language like PHP; that's the way of Serendipity, Wordpress, Ghost or other blog engines and CMS and the most flexible way to add interaction like comments. The other way is to use a static site generator that will create static pages, using only HTML and CSS (and, optionally, JS), from source files; there are lots of them like Jekyll, Nanoc and others, written in Ruby, Perl, PHP or other languages, even incorporated into Github (Github pages). You don't need a server-side scripting language that way, so your webspace / server will use much less ressources, and you don't have to worry about security updates of your scripting language, but you lose some flexibility as your pages are build once (and then uploaded), but not created for each visitor individually. You can add comments and so using external services like Disqus. Both ways, you won't have to worry about "housekeeping tasks" like adding and removing posts from your start page or your archives, add archives sorted by topics, update RSS or atom feeds etc.
You can, but you shouldn't. You'll have to do a lot of boring extra work that way with no benefit at all.MosesKhan wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 8:47 amTl;dr All I'm asking in this post is if a simple blog site with no comments is possible using html only. Thanks.
