2022-05-10

saved by html

I haven't updated this website in a long time. I know, I know, it's such a cliché thing to post on a personal site. My intention with bob dot website was to present a positive side of myself to the world that I felt I was hiding away - someone who is intelligent, creative and able to express himself in eloquent prose. As a result, my standards for putting anything on here were paralysingly high. If I wanted to talk about something, I found it a lot easier to write a tweet or a facebook update or just send someone a message. However, there is another (much more embarrassing) reason why I haven't been posting here... I forgot how to update this website.

Up until now, I used some hand-written code (in Python) to produce formatted HTML pages from markdown files. Since writing my last post (ironically this documented how I update this website, but did not include the site generation code itself) I have bought a new computer (an M1 Macbook Air) and I have not yet transferred my old coding projects from my backups to my new machine. I still haven't done this, by the way. To be honest, every time I look at my old projects folders I feel a bit guilty. They remind me of the things I tried and gave up on. I'd rather not look at them.

Fortunately, I have figured out how to update this website without using a static site generator - just write HTML by hand. I wrote the site generator to produce really simple HTML (look at the source of this page) so it was easy to copy a file and change the content. Thank you to HTML Energy for reminding us every day that you can just write HTML. I'm also grateful to the various manifesto-writers and designers who promote Brutalist web design. If we appreciate that simple websites are good, then it becomes easier to make new websites.