For my part, I don’t want to render pages on every request. Nor do I want to bother setting up a cache. Not when all I want is for pages to have consistent menus, footers, etc. I think it makes more sense to build my site locally and then push to my host.
Admittedly, I could use Kirby with the Static Site Generator plugin, but then I’d have to adapt all of my material to fit in the CMS, and that would involve converting HTML back to Markdown.
My current setup isn’t really a SSG, but even when I used Jekyll my publishing process was still just rsync to shared hosting over SSH.
Oh, I definitely do it because I can. Never mind that my wife is more impressed by my cooking.
The thing is, I eventually came to the conclusion that existing SSGs were all made with certain opinions about what a website should look like, and that rather than fighting with them I figured that if I wanted something done my way I had to do it myself.
Besides, since I’ve already got brain damage from exposure to Unix in college, I might as well take advantage of it.
but then I’d have to adapt all of my material to fit in the CMS, and that would involve converting HTML back to Markdown.
Well, not really, kirby for example uses markdown but you can totally just store raw html inside the .txt files and render that. Markdown is just easier to write imo.
Nor do I want to bother setting up a cache.
In my case setting up a cache is a single value in a config file so it takes 3 seconds but I guess that depends on the server setup.
As for the publishing setup, the thing I come back to over and over again is that you’re chained to your desk. What if you don’t have access to your shell. What if you’re on vacation and don’t have your laptop with you. What if you just have your phone?
Personally, a setup that prevents me from publishing content from anywhere, anytime, is a limiting setup. But that’s just how I see it and I’m perfectly fine with other people having different ideas.
And if it works for them that’s awesome. At the end of the day what I do care about is people having personal sites and ditching social media. How they do it is not really all that important.
That’s simpler than I had expected since the last CMS I had used was WordPress, and that required an external cache. I think it was Varnish. When it worked, everything was just ducky. When it didn’t, that’s when the fun began. /s
If I’m on vacation, by which I mean a real vacation away from home, I don’t even have my phone. At least, not a smartphone. I’d just have a burner handset in case of an emergency. And to write things down while I’m away, I’d have a pen and notebook. Not nearly as expensive, and much lighter. Not that I can push to the web directly from pen and paper, but to me being on vacation also means going low-tech.
If I’m going to go to the Louvre again, like my wife Catherine and I did in 2017, I don’t want to see some of the world’s greatest art from behind a camera. I’d rather write down what I see, even if I never publish it online. Likewise if we ever get to visit Florence or Rome.
You’re right. It is limiting in one sense. But my website can wait until I get back.
That’s what I don’t get. Why can’t he just use Frontpage still if that is his ideal way of building and maintaining a website?
I was more of a Dreamweaver guy myself. And boy did I get around with Dreamweaver 4! You wouldn’t believe the designs I was able to make with Photoshop and HTML tables
Damned if I know. Maybe he doesn’t think it’ll run on his current version of Windows. Or maybe he’s not willing to get a bootleg version on the high seas since it’s no longer for sale? Or maybe what he wants is for there to be a modern WYSIWYG application for people who want to build their own websites?
I think you’d be surprised by what I could believe people using Dreamweaver and Photoshop could do. All I’m going to say is that I’ve seen people at my day job try to design web layouts with Powerpoint, especting pixel-perfect fidelity on both desktop and mobile, and dealing with them made me nostalgic for the “bad old days” of table-based layouts made with Photoshop and Dreamweaver.
Front page is uniquely janky and is not happy on newer Windows systems. (it hardly worked Windows even back then) Pre-Adobe Dreamweaver at the very least is stable on Windows 10 so I think that’d be a far better option in that regard.
Thankfully for me Kirby has built in support for a bunch of different caches so it’s only a matter of adding a setting in the config file.
On my particular setup looks like this
You’re right. It is limiting in one sense. But my website can wait until I get back.
And this is absolutely fine. As I said, if someone decides, on purpose, to set up a site in that way I have no issues with it. And that is because you are perfectly aware of the limitations. But for most people who want a blog, those limitations are probably getting in the way of publishing. And that is why I don’t think SSGs are a good solutions for non technical people who want a blog.
Definitely not. This is why I don’t tell people that they should use makefiles, shell scripts, and Unix tools to build their websites. The fact that I can do so doesn’t necessarily mean that even I should, and I’d have to be a special kind of jerk to tell somebody who just wants to build a website that they should become a programmer and sysadmin in the process.
Frankly, if I was the world’s Evil Overlord I’d force game console manufacturers to include easy-to-use web publishing apps. A kid should be able to plug a keyboard into their Switch, Xbox, or PlayStation and build their first website in between rounds of Fortnite, goddammit, and safely be able to self-host their websites, email, and IRC/XMPP chats on their game consoles, to boot!
We can make a better internet. We have the technology.
Of course, this is why I don’t recommend GNU/Linux to people despite using it myself. You gotta be your own sysadmin, or know somebody in the neighborhood who’s willing to admin your machine for beer and pizza. I certainly don’t recommend text mode; the days when one could get away with expecting “typists, secretaries, and casual users” to put up with ed(1) are long over, if they ever existed outside of Bell Labs under AT&T in the first place.
I have absolutely no problem with this, since I don’t have to build a web application around his Excel art.
HTML and CSS are big and still growing so I don’t think you can feasibly have a fully WYSIWYG editor that covers all of HTML. Much more often an editor will target a subset of HTML or a smaller language like Markdown, RTF, BBCode, or Delta. Those languages translate to HTML but the trip is one-way.
Looking at the first product in the blog post, Pinegrow, I can see it has some special features for working with Bootstrap components. This makes perfect sense if we think of Bootstrap as a subset of HTML.
The author’s desire for something “like blogger,” available in the browser with the ability to drag and drop images onto the editor points to CMS.
Maybe more fundamentally a responsive page just can’t be made by the act of drawing, but I don’t think that’s what the author wants anyway.
We have opted to make MT4’s rich text editor completely pluggable and allow users to install (via a plugin) the rich text editor they prefer. We have found that there are no right answers in choosing an RTE [Rich Text Editor], just a lot of wrong ones based upon your personal preferences. :)
This i think is the main problem. 20 years ago, before responsive web design, CSS3 and all the other nice things we have today, making a page was a lot “simpler” because it was a less dynamic environment.
Best viewed on 800x600 was a thing after all. Today’s web is a different beast. There’s a million ways to make a simply static html page but that’s not what people want most of the time.
And so whether you like it or not you quickly find yourself dealing with the “modern” web unless you’re happy to delegate part of the work to someone else and that means using a platform of some sort.
In my experience, websites are mostly a tradeoff: you trade ease of use with design flexibility. And each person will decide what’s best for them and their specific use case and that’s why there’s a million different tools out there that all do the same thing in a slightly different way.
Doesn’t Dreamweaver do exactly that though? Cover all of HTML and CSS? So the function of such is certainly possible. It’s just… you know… owned by adobe and locked into a subscription model.
I personally own Pinegrow and it covers so much more than you’d expect. Also for a non-HTML-savy user it has interface elements reminiscent of block builders like Square or Wordpress, while also giving the user access to the HTML and all its elements. In a lot of ways it’s more visually easier to understand than Composer and Dreamweaver were in the 2000’s. I use it in conjunction with hand-coding my site because it gives me a visual frame of reference for all the CSS tweaks I want to do. I learn all kinds of new elements that I can use in CSS and how it’s applied and it also does a lot of the maths for me.
The function is absolutely possible.
Now as far as the matter of making the images easier to implement into webpages without the user knowing exactly how to upload and manage the files, I think there could be space for a function that steps the user into setting up synced directories with their webhost. Put the image in the sync’d directory, and it’s uploaded to the host, easy enough for anyone to understand without the use of a database. And then only allow the user to add images to the site if they’re in that sync’d directory in order to ensure no outside images are used. Give the notification that the image will be copied into the sync director if an image is imported or dragged/dropped into the window. There are ways to do it.
That all said, Pinegrow in this instance may not meet the needs of the blog author, but IMO the blog/vent highlights a larger over-arching issue of the difficulty of casual website making: We are severely lacking in options to make it easier for the average user to get into web-making, options that aren’t corporate owned and take ownership away from the individual. And that starts with having more options for robust and affordable WYSIWYG html editors. And that’s the angle I’m jumping off from, here, not so much that what I’m offering is a fix for the OP, specifically.
I can’t answer with regard to Dreamweaver but this is the interface for Pinegrow and that is something you can absolutely do, entirely visually, without touching the code to fix it at all. I added those 2 drop shadows just now, they were not there before. And as you can see I can add multiple text shadows with all sorts of features and colors, it’s incredible robust.
And this is on a 3 year old version of pinegrow, I’m sure it’s only improved more from there.
That example is so funny to me somehow. Because it’s literally just like writing css but in a more convoluted way.
It’s all right there. There’s the relevant css file, the selector used, all the individual properties have a dedicated field where you have to insert a value.
You’d think that in a GUI they’d try to use different approaches but no, it’s just css but with individual input fields. But hey, if some people find this useful that’s awesome!
I heard about it. I follow the creator’s RSS feed because he’s also into Emacs. I was thinking of adding it, but it looks like a paid platform and I didn’t see a place for it in the list of resources.
