Duct tape blogging
Low tech blogging tools for the pragmatic programmer.
If you are like me…
If you are like me, you write a few times a year, sometimes more - not enough to warrant keeping up-to-date with the latest static site generator. You still want a reliable website and meaningful tools, although you have no need for many features: comments, likes, tags, search…
How do you blog with a minimal tooling suite? Welcome to duct tape blogging.
Steps to make a blog
Here are the steps I am following for this blog:
Set-up
For the HTML/CSS part, you don’t need anything over the top - less is more. Consider having one index.html page listing all your blog posts, and one .html page by blog post. And that’s it.
- Make a basic HTML template, with the necessary
divs.
Pro-tip: keep it simple with a header, a main content div, and a footer.
- Style your HTML template.
Add some colours - maybe use a dictionary of colours combinations.
Align your divs - or not. If you stack your divs on a single column, it will be easier to make it quasi-responsive.
Consider using the web developer tooling to check for accessibility: MDN - Accessibility Inspector.
Content
Write a blog post, on any text editing tool you want. This is the content.
You can write directly in Markdown if you wish, or just use text without any sort of markup.
Content-to-HTML
With pandoc, convert your .txt/.md file to HTML.
Update your blog
Copy-paste the created HTML into your HTML template.
Create an index entry on the index.html page for your new blog post.
You’re done !
You can publish your updated website on your favorite hosting solution.
For more low tech solutions to blogging, read the generating HTML from a csv file with Python.