i always have a LOT of things to say and i don’t like it when things aren’t chronological in some sense, like on microblogging platforms i just dump all of my thoughts out and i don’t want my website to be like that bc it just becomes a meaningless stream of thoughts
i like having things organized, but i also like having them somewhwat chronological. i then get anxious about how things will be searchable again (ie. if i make a page for music and just randomly dump links to songs i like whenever i feel like it, there won’t really be any sort of chronology to it)
some pages i have i want more for like “okay a friend asked me how to study this topic so ill have a page i can send to anyone who asks me that as a resource list and basic overview” but then i’m like. for one; chronology, for another, how do i decide what information/thought goes where?
i’ve loosely thought about having a microblog where i dump raw thoughts out (but again these are just unordered lists) and then having a proper blog for more refined thoughts and then dumping everything else into wherever it belongs on the site… or something
the problem then also becomes how i organize this in HTML, like obviously my website needs to make semantic sense… and then i also need to have a way to be able to communicate all this information through a RSS feed so i need an xml… WHAT IS MY XML HERE THEN !!!
does anyone have any thoughts or maybe another website that maybe handles this sorta thing well? maybe there’s a secret html element made for this specifically? something ?
I recommend a wiki with a system of tags or categories. PmWiki fits the bill, but requires PHP on the server side. TiddlyWiki requires JavaScript, but on the plus side it organizes information in so-called tiddlers, which are smaller than a page and can be recombined in multiple views. Very useful when you’re still figuring out what goes where. Plus, each tiddler can have tags and be a tag for others in turn. Or if you prefer to organize your writing in a table of contents, try Feather Wiki. Its tag system is much weaker, but the whole app is much lighter, too.
Of course, none of this tells you how to actually organize your thoughts, because there’s no rule, and it depends on so many things. Experiment away!
Edit: as for a newsfeed, in a wiki that’s usually just the list of recent changes. Not always helpful, but gives readers an idea of what’s fresh.
Is there a reason why you need things to be in chronological order? For example, if you’re making a page with resources about a certain topic, it might be easier if it more important/general resources come first.
Have you considered making a blog? Not a microblog, a regular blog. It’ll display entries chronologically and you can use tags to make them filterable. You can also link entries to one another, edit them (and write that you’ve edited them and when) and so on. A lot of blogging platforms and software nowadays will also let you make pages, which you could use to link to different entries in more specific ways if tags are not enough. They’ll usually generate the RSS feed for you.
I’m not sure what you mean about the HTML part. Can you elaborate? Usually, you’d write your HTML in the order you want things to appear on the page, and HTML tags have a specific order to them.
For example, if you want to display an image before some text, that’s the order you’d use in your HTML. If you want the image to be a link, you’d put an a (link) tag first, then the image tag, then close the a tag.
hm, i looked into the things you sent and these all definitely seem a lot more reliant on other technologies than i’d like, i do think my problem is just how would i do this with as little external libraries and frameworks as possible, i already tried using a SSG once and i didn’t really enjoy it much, i like just working with HTML and keeping things plain, but that does also mean i’m basically just looking at a bunch of text files with some visual touches and semantics, but it’s kinda hard to really organize it unless you come up with your own system of some sort
as you mentioned, this really does feel like it depends on so many things, i’ve tried different ways to do it in the past and none of them really seem to work right, so i guess i’ll just keep trying new things and hoping one of them matches it
i will definitely try to implement a newsfeed of sorts, all it does is list out changes, so maybe i don’t really need to worry about the content on the page having a chronology, just have a little section at the bottom of each page listing changes? (or maybe one single page listing ALL changes? [ or maybe one page that somehow embeds the newsfeed from every page so everything is easily visible?? OH NO more to think about…])
eitherway thank you for writing all that, the solutions you suggested seem interesting, especially whenever i get my own server to host the site on, i might try the php one out! (not a fan of client side processing at all)
right i wasn’t clear about that, i don’t need them to be in chronological order necessarily, if so then i’d def just make a blog. i just feel anxious when i can’t look back at how things have evolved overtime, so knowing when i added something, when i removed something, when i changed something, etc. is important. but otherwise i do prefer organizing my site in a way that’s more oriented towards the viewer just wanting to see information, but also being able to easily see how things evolved overtime.
i think for this, the best way to do it really is to just have a little update log at the bottom of each page, i’ll have to think more about how exactly i’ll achieve this since i do want to stick to just HTML as much as possible, partially because it’s a static site and also because i just like plain HTML instead of getting caught up on different frameworks and stuff, it always turns into a huge waste of time for me
i do in fact have a blog on my current website, along with the microblog and the other pages. i think that’s the thing, currently i’m just wondering what goes where. what goes in my microblog? what goes in my blog? what goes in my normal pages? how do i make information presetable if it’s through a blog when i like being able to organize things more on the fly rather than chronologically?
my bad, it’s worded weirdly. i just wanted to reiterate how i wanted to organize all my thoughts into a way that accomodates all the other stuff i mentioned into plain HTML, like not a single HTML file just how do you organize all this information into a simple pure HTML based static website. so like also avoid relying on other things like a sqlite db or something, so like is there a way to achieve all this with mostly HTML and maybe xml or json at most (and again it’s a static website bc i don’t have a server sooo kinda limited with my options)
still, thanks a lot for the answer! i like the idea of tags you mentioned, while i have considered tags for my blog before (just never got around to it bc i have no idea how i’d make that work on a static blog) i just had the idea of using tags on each and every page in the site, so i can have some system of organization… that’s a bit hard to imagine right now but it’s an idea i can expand on and maybe get something neat out of. thank you again!
It’s hard to tell how to organize a purely handcrafted site because it can be anything from one long web page to a big old tree with dozens of directories and hundreds of files. You can have systematic menus, wiki-style links that point every which way, or a combination. A central journal page where you add updates at the top, news sections on every page, or both.
Either way, the problem with handcrafted sites is precisely that any systematic structure has to be copy-pasted between pages if you won’t use automatic tools at all. Or else you have to settle for various sections having older layouts, navigation that’s not complete or up to date, and so on. You can make category pages by hand… but then you have to maintain them. That’s why I also use static site generators and other helpers. Not so much that they take over the site, but to handle the repetitive work while I have fun.
my suggestion is to include the date in the title of each post/entry so that info is immediately obvious and make a page with links to your pieces like this:
have a little box with a link to each one and make them sortable using solaria’s css-filtering method! you can tell the chronology at a glance and sort them by topic, but they’re also all in one place.
then have a separate page for microblogging / putting less-organized thoughts, which you could also make filterable if you wanted! i would probably set it up as just one long page with each “post” as its own div & tag filters maybe floating like this
so you can have a “dump” and then easily skim through that to make a music roundup post, for example.
just my opinion tho! organization methods are very personal. my “microblogging” is a pile of draggable divs stacked on top of each other, so the oldest one is on the bottom and the newest one is on the top, & i dont bother with dates or organizing or whatever.
yeah, i did think about that a lot at some point. i have tried SSGs in the past, i tried astro first but that was far too heavily reliant on react and while react can be fun, i ultimately decided i want to stick as close as possible to simple stuff, the SSG should only be there to automate things i don’t want to do myself, not completely change how i make a webstie yknow? i tried 11ty a few months ago and it was a LOT better than astro but it also suffered the same issue of having its own weird way of doing things when you start digging into it instead of being a tool for simple automation. maybe i should give 11ty or some other SSG a try and see if it works for me, i do think it might be worth it to sacrifice some of the fun of writing HTML for the sake of my sanity
hm… i might try this? i’m not sure bc honestly after reading some of the other replies and your para at the end, i do think i’m starting to think that having a microblog that is very lightweight on organization might be helpful, that’s where things get dumped, and then everything else is where organization kicks in… just need to figure out how blogs vs wiki-style pages fit into this now but yeah for the microblog, i think i’ll just like have the date written as a header and throw microblog posts as bullet points under the header (which is what i’m doing right now)
as for the tagging… i honestly might just use an ssg or some sort of light js for this, bc if i want tagging it’ll have to be on the whole website, across the wiki and the blog, so i don’t think there’s a real solution to that unless i resort to ssgs or js lol.
thanks for this though! it’s very insightful to understanding how html and css works and i might use it for some other little thing along the way!
edit: ALSO thanks for pagefind! i do have to look into how this is working and how much of a performance hit it is but if this can be used as an external thing that is only there if someone wants it (ie there’s a search page that you otherwise won’t have to load into your browser w any relatively heavyweight js) i think it should be a good way to do this! esp based on how good the search results are, if it’s good enough i might not even need to make tags and stuff because i can just search and get what i want relatively easily (so i can just have tags written as plaintext “tags” and not a system of any sort and search through them… maybe even use hashtags so i can search hashtags across my website LOL)
It might be much, much easier to decide what you want out of your site before making decisions about whether it’s going to be plain HTML, or incoporate JS or a wiki. In your situation, knowing what you want to make and looking up the tools you’ll need after you’ve got a plan might make it less confusing.
When I saw your reply about wanting to keep track of changes on individual pages, I was going to say a Wiki might be the right choice for you after all. I think some Wikis let you automatically track a page’s history (like on Wikipedia) and they usually have search features and tags/categories.
Then I saw that you just want plain HTML, then I saw that you’re thinking about a wiki after all… see how that gets confusing?
To answer your question about blogging vs microblogging, my impression has always been that microblogging is for short ideas, links, etc. on the fly, whereas a blog gives you more room to write and organise your entries.
Nothing on your site has to be permanent. The best advice I would give is just build something, and see what you like. The optimal solution will present itself as you iterate. I find in life the best way of doing anything is usually discovered, not planned.
In specific advice, I do like having 11ty as a SSG, just because it let me atomize components of my site. So all my blogs are seperate markdown files, and I can re-arrange the style, format and ordering in html however I like, while keeping in content in tact.
In any event, none of these solutions are either/or. All my websites are an unholy mix of static pages, SSG-made sections and web apps. Most of them have a wiki and a blog, microblog or journal. Sometimes all three, because I migrated with time as my goals and mood changed. It’s worth trying stuff out in a corner to see how it works and decide later.
that sounds quite interesting! how do you manage to make it all those things at once though? also what SSG do you use? my problem is just that i spend so much time migrating that i don’t get to work on the website much so i’m voiding doing another switch
hm… i dunno i just felt like 11ty is very weird with how it does collections of things and how images are handled and stuff. idk maybe i’ll give it another shot but it just felt like a bit too much, i just wanted the markdown to html and layouts but i found the idea of collections helpful but didn’t like how they were implemented in 11ty. idk though maybe i really should try it again, i’ll see! i think for my purposes an ssg does seem to be the besy way
yeah… the thing is i really like the idea of having a website without a lot of external things, just simple html and stuff. but then it feels like the things i want to achieve could be done in html but would be so much less painful if i just bit the bullet and used something else. i just don’t like being forced into using a completely different system/method of building the website, so maybe i’ll just dig around and see if i can find an ssg or something that works well enough for me and see if they have a wiki-like implementation of things
in all honesty my life would be easier if i could just make this website dynamic and work with a simple database and stuff, having a seperate backend serving the frontend makes things so much clearner. but yeah for the time being i’ll have to figure out a way to make this work
as for making things clear, from this thread i’ve figured out a few things
i want a way to keep track of my changes and the best way seems to be a changelog on every page, it would be nice if this changelog could be accessible for every page but could also be merged to make a changelog of the entire website. so this feels like a database thing sadly
a searchable site is also nice, while i like the idea of categories and tags, i think it would force me into having to figure everything out now, if i can search things i could be a bit more free to experiment with systems
i do need to figure out how i want to present information… as i said i like having a microblog, but then i also might want to have blogs? maybe i can have a system of threads where microblogs can have more thoughts nested under them (so then it becomes more of a tumblr like heading/body thing) so there’s only really one page where my thoughts are aired out immediately and then everything else is more of a “i need to explain this to someone” or something like that. or maybe i want to pull certain microblog entries into a specific theme (so maybe i have a page where i list out movies i’ve watched and i can attach the microblog entries where i write my thoughts on them? hm…)
What do you mean? Different sections of the site just live in their own folders. Got a couple of SSGs I made myself, one for microblogs, the other for minisites. Each is just one Python script that lives right there with the data file and generated pages. I only use them for sections that require a little automation for the repetitive parts. Tagging for example. Guess you can also make a tool that works on hidden markings in handcrafted pages. It’s just not the path I took.
OHHH CUSTOM SCRIPTS !!! ok that makes sense. so i’m assuming your blog is run by a script that populates things as needed?
i’m looking into 11ty again… i’ll try to find a way to have tags on every page and somehow pull them into pages as needed. so more like a querying system like sql or something so i can make pages on the fly on things if i need them like that.
Yes! For example the old blog on my gamedev site was made with a different script written in Tcl; that one is more conventional, working off a folder full of markdown files. It generates archive pages for each tag among other things. It’s not dynamic, obviously. For that it would have to use either PHP on the sever side, or else Javascript in the browser.
Nowadays I use ready-made SSGs too. Went with Pelican for a while, and now Marmite. But that’s on my other websites.
oh these look cool but i feel like if i look into more SSGs now i’m only going to confuse myself… from what i’ve seen 11ty does have a system where you can tag pages and then query pages from throughout the website by tags so i think that might be the way to go? again right now i’m just thinking about how i might be over complicating this issue for myself and want to get a bare minimum system in place so i can start working and then think about the specifics as i go on…
