i like to make websites and I've been slowly realizing that my requirements for making websites might be a little weird

Julia Evans

- I have maybe 20 websites (mostly static but not all)
- I want to spend basically 0 time maintaining them, maybe 5 minutes every 2 months at most
- I need to be able to ignore a project for 3 years and then come back and be able to develop it easily

i feel like all of this stuff makes my choice of tech stack different than if I worked on one site full-time

Adriano

@b0rk I want you to know that I will buy this book/leaflet/scribble/pamphlet/letter in a bottle the minute you publish it.

knowuh

@b0rk many of us would like to know what your typical setup is for this if and when you find time to share it.

filipa mv

@b0rk it’s an enlightened path

Ted Mielczarek

@b0rk the tech industry has aligned itself around the needs of huge corporations who have teams dedicated to maintaining their sites as well as teams dedicated to maintaining the frameworks they use to develop those sites. It's kind of ridiculous that anyone uses these technologies for personal sites!

Emelia/Emi

@b0rk I mean, that's basically the same way I do it for my stuff, so as far as that goes it's just nginx with certbot on debian stable, and either statically-generated sites or hand-written HTML (But it does have PHP set up, so I can do stuff with that if necessary). With unattended-upgrades the only manual updates I need to do are when debian makes a new stable release, and the stack itself is stable enough that it just Keeps Working.

For the stuff that needs to be dynamic, if I can't find a stable-enough "off-the-shelf" stack for it I usually just bodge something together with a 'stable-ish' framework ("pretty much anything that isn't go or nodejs" at this point)

Madame Pres commandasaurus 🦖

@adriano @b0rk I would also like to purchase this, please and thank you

Marijke Luttekes

@b0rk I'm slightly shocked at seeing this sensible list described as "might be a little weird".

That is an excellent set of requirements!

Marijke Luttekes

@tedmielczarek @b0rk And somehow the industry has also decided to call this progress

Zaͩnͦsͤt̀́rͤa̅̆̈

@b0rk That’s indeed a true observation. Plus: on your own sites, you determine your requirements. Professionally, if you know the actual requirements, you might consider yourself lucky.

Edit: you were not saying that exactly. But still, interesting …

Chris Ford :tw:

@b0rk What tech choices does it lead you to?

Daniël Franke :panheart:

@mahryekuh @tedmielczarek @b0rk

I honestly miss the times of geocities et al. Hell, I'll even welcome MS Frontpage back.

evana

@b0rk the constant churn of the JavaScript ecosystem doesn't lend itself well to that. Static site generators _can_ help, but generally less code is more, so I'd look at the actual output and see what kind of dependencies it has. Writing a small amount of JavaScript yourself for areas where you need dynamism may also be a reasonable idea -- I'd consider the amount of code in your source repo across both build and run time. (This pattern can also apply to many other areas of effort once you decide that maintenance cost and non-technical outcomes are more important than demonstrating your technical sophistication.)

Of course, I say this and then have spent the last 3 months building a dynamic site to represent results of an API. But I didn't see a better way to do it, and I'm happy to resent my choices later.

Ted Mielczarek

@mahryekuh @b0rk I'm willing to believe that using things like React does make it easier to develop and maintain Facebook, as long as you have a dedicated React team. I feel the same way about tools like kubernetes. Probably fine for Google-scale companies who have huge infra teams!

Julia Evans

@evana yeah I've had to spend so much time learning how to work with the JS ecosystem in a way that works for me, I wrote this about it https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/18/how-to-import-a-javascript-library/ and this https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/

Julia Evans

@tedmielczarek what kinds of frameworks do you mean? i feel like I use a lot of "technologies" to build my sites, for example on my latest project I'm using S3, a Dockerfile, a managed deployment service, GitHub Actions, and probably more things.

definitely gauging what is worth it and what isn't can get complicated and sometimes I try a new thing and decide it isn't worth the complexity

Elric

@frankdelporte @b0rk +1 for hugo, but I run it in a container with a fixed (and now ancient) version because they aren't as backwards-compatible as I'd sometimes like...

markwalker

@b0rk I feel the same way. I also want it to cost as little as possible and be easy for me to create content. Like content from my phone would be a win.

Currently I have an unmaintained netlify project running gatsby because at one point in time it was easy to add markdown files to a repo and have dependabot keep it updated.

Ted Mielczarek

@b0rk I'm primarily thinking about frameworks like React here, which seem to only work well for companies who can dedicate staff to wrangle the complexity.

Dimitri Kokkonis

@b0rk fwiw this is exactly why I made https://github.com/kokkonisd/mrbones

I wanna make the site not fight the site generator