My website is breaking. I want this website to be my home on the internet for ever. This website has way to many dependencies, is complicated for the sake of it (I was learning the tech) and as such is slowly starting to fall apart.
What do I want
Easily searchable. This could be just ctrl + f but perhaps a tagging system is better. In fact maybe some form of tagging search system within the post itself.
For example in my personal notes I use @@tag so I can grep @@word to find the tag across all my files. Would something like this work in a website? A page with all the tags and references to them. The key is not to use any code that won't be supported in 40 years. So that means no databases1. Shell scripting is acceptable as long as it does not call any external programs that have not been around for 40 years already.
Exceptions to the 40 year rule are going to be everywhere I understand that. The web for one, HTML/CSS for another. Whatever you understand what I mean.
Markdown
The posts will be written in markdown, this then needs to be converted to HTML. I do concede that this breaks the 40 year rule. Ah well, I'm not writing html and if I make my own markdown parser then this should not be that much of a deal.
It would be relatively simple to implement markdown using sed and some if
statements.
Design
Would probably be some form of static site generation, of course I know they exist already but will they be maintained in 40 years? Who knows.
All the tags would be pre generated pages and clicking a tag goes to that link page. Each link page is indexed in a tag link page.
Each blog should also have support for categories, these are different then
tags. They are broad and overarching and apply to the whole post itself. They
should also generate separated pages /blog/categories that are added to the
homepage.
Microlog
A page to display posts with the category microlog. Much like the one on this website. Basically a very short "update style" post.
I find them very useful. These posts should not be on the main blog index page.
Non posts
Separate non post pages are super important and custom design of these is a must. As such I expect these things to be hardcoded and the static generation to just handle blog posts.
Javascript
I guess a sprinkling is fine. It's not going anywhere but I don't want no frameworks. Is it even necessary?
RSS
Necessary.
Deployment
A folder that I can rsync to a /var/www/mysite
XKCD Fallacy
Nah, IDK about that. I will be using it only, if other people want to then go ahead but it's the standard for me. I don't want to have to rely on someone else.
Summary of wants
- Static site generation for blog/content/whatever you want to call it only.
Css for styling is fine.
Markdown for content
-
Must not use any tools under 40 years old
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Custom page support
-
Tagging system internal to blog posts when it detects a special char preceeding a word that becomes a tag
That tag becomes a link to the tag page with all other instances of said tag
- Categories page for blog post categories
could these be done by html comments in the content? <!-- cat=blah,cat=python --!>
-
Microlog functionality
-
RSS
-
EZPZ rsync deployment
Seems kinda simple. As it should be.
This site
Is actually breaking as I write this. For whatever reason I can't add new tags anymore, the editor is broken, previews and draft saving still work but I get a 500 error for whatever reason.
It's strange that this website has been up only 5 years and not much has changed about it yet it's breaking. Django & python needs to be updated, the packages this site uses are all breaking or are not maintained anymore. Not to say that change is bad, but for something like this website, where it's not my main focus and is not really (or should not be) doing anything complicated it should not break.
Will I make this?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Yeah ok you can probably find a database over 40 years old but just we don't need a database for this. So no databases. ↩