Bloggings

A Minimalist blog

23-11-2023

Updated 07-09-2025

+ In the past I've used several blog engines, CMS, and rolled my own solutions, but at + the end of the day, I find writing simple html is faster and easier than using a blog + engine. A blog engine or CMS makes you dependant on other softwareand may no longer exist + or be obsolete in a couple of years. Plus you usually have to hack the html and css + of these engines to get what you want anyway, which defeats their purpose. +

+ After playing with 8 bit computers, my IT career debuted writing invoicing + applications using Multiplan on MS-DOS, so plain text has a nostalgic pull + for me. Searching for a reasonable solution, I looked at + Gopher and + Gemini. +

+ Both are nice although Gopher is old and quirky and Gemini still a bit experimental, + but the fundemental problem is that they both require specific browsers, html bridges or plugins to be viewed, + limiting their use and content availability to a few initiates, and I really mean a few. + Lets face it, the www is the common denominator today. +

+ Ok, you can't put the djinn back in the bottle. You can do a load of stupid stuff + with a web site, and there are billions of them out there producing carbon, wasting energy, + and displaying a marked lack of content behind a show of technological sleight of hand. +

+ Instead, the onus is on you to write a universally readable web site, + not on the reader to posess the right browser. +

+ Of course, you can't force people to be responsible, and major search engines + don't offer to filter out crap websites. In the mean time, I'll practice what I preach. +

+ So here's a blog with articles that just uses simple html. + There are no Javascript, grids, or + fancy formats. Articles are plain html and can be read in a terminal text browser like + Lynx, or a simple browser + graphical browser like Dillo, or a state + of the art browser like + Firefox. +

+ The only extras are the use of some basic css for browsers that can use + it, and UTF-8 character encoding rather than ASCII. Behind the scenes + there's some PHP for generating article listings and search, and a couple of + bash scripts to edit new articles and upload them. I think + this arrangement will be pretty future resistant.

You can download the scripts here +

+ A Google only web is on the horizon. Let them have it. Instead let's go + back to enjoying a fast, pertinent, content-rich space where you are not + the product. +

+ For info, I use Librewolf, + a more secure version of Firefox, and + Chawan, + perhaps the best terminal web browser to date. +

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