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The site’s design is simple. All of what I serve currently are static pages. My thought is that if I don’t have a lot of traffic, it’s better to have a site that loads super fast so people explore more. All sites should be fast, anyway. The current Web ecosystem where sites are free to take 2 seconds to load content not related to the main content is stupid and needs to die.
Further, unless there are pages where Javascript may be useful (such as interactive graphs), the site should load fine on text-based browsers. Most of those don’t have support for Javascript. If people want to view my site by those means, or just read the curl output, that’s awesome. By serving purely static pages when possible, people can save articles for offline use and read or archive them at their leisure.
I currently use AsciiDoc to generate the main site content pages, and I source control them on in a git repository. I find AsciiDoc to be a very intuitive, syntactically lightweight, and flexible language. I considered trying to static generators like Antora [1], a static generator for Markdown, or using a CMS like Grav (which also uses Markdown with some extensions).
In the end, the extensibility of AsciiDoc and the easiness of getting
Asciidoctor to work (install ruby, then gem install
asciidoctor [2]) won out.
As an aside, mobile friendliness is not too difficult. I just ripped the idea from the PuTTY homepage after observing that it was much more mobile friendly than I imagined it would be.
I do happen to host other applications (such as gitea[3]) that probably don’t fit the site’s methods too much, but those applications are very useful and I try to be very lightweight with them if I can. Nevertheless, descriptive links from the static site should be good enough in many cases to help smooth over issues with browsers that might not have javascript or good CSS capabilities.