OK, here we are, on my website. How is it generated? How is it hosted?

First, let’s talk about the context. The technical constraints always come from the context.

This is a very low traffic site, with only static content. It contains a basic website, plus some downloadable PDFs of things I wrote.

That’s already a very different problem from the things I work on at work!

Priorities

First of all, since this is my project, I get to choose the priorities.

In sum, I’m here to learn a few new things, play with servers a little, and keep a stable web presence.

Non-priorities

There are also some things I don’t really care about.

Hosting

I’ve had a lot of web hosting arrangements over the years. I think the history was something like this:

Site generation

Historically, this site has always been basically static HTML, with hand-rolled CSS. I used to write a new stylesheet every so often, just because I could.

I’ve always supplemented the static files with some extra programmatic tools, when I needed them. For example:

Right now, a static site generator is the sweet spot for me between “100% hand edited HTML files in a directory” and “100% dynamically generated content.”

I do wish I had a lightweight solution for contact forms. I used to use PHP for that once in a while, but only because I used to need it for WordPress. Now… 🤷‍♀️.

Conclusions

This site looks pretty basic, but it actually takes a lot of work over the years to keep it going. The requirements of the web are always changing. I don’t want it to look too dated. I want it to work on mobile. I want it to keep running for decades at a time.

Minimalism is not actually all that cheap, when you think about it.