It took me a bit more than two hours of work but I came up with a simple engine. The data is read from a TOML file and spits out more-or-less the HTML I hand wrote.
The real exercise here is to see if a single-file script can do what I want. I mean: no dependencies other than the standard library (Python 3.11 at the moment).
Somehow I always end up with tech ideas on Sunday mornings.
Is it because I am “refreshed” after a Saturday focused on chores and family activities? Or maybe it´s the “relaxed” time it takes me to whip up the Sunday breakfast (waffles, pancakes, or crêpes).
I don´t often take much action to follow-up on these ideas. Today is different. Today I am taking notes. Today I am actually doing something else than rambling in my heads. Today it is on paper. (And now digital.)
I have another project I would like to work on and I though it was a perfect opportunity to finally push the "memos" online.
Of course plumbing is a pain: I just spent at least a full hour looking at DNS, NS records, static web hosting, and other unwieldy concepts. I ended up pushing the static files to a repository on SourceHut and using my domain with their hosting for now.
Now onto how to make it easier for me to publish… (Or should I simply spin-up an instance of microblog.pub?)
I am a big fan of the "reader mode" in Firefox. It couples a gentle sepia tone with distraction-free content, great for long pieces of text.
It turns out that you don´t want to forget the basic HTML metadata such as author in the page header.
I already planned for a couple of features for a next version. Tags are well recognised in the blogosphere, they are a dynamic free-form of grouping articles together by themes.
Let´s take a sneak peek at what it could look like with the current stylesheet.
It´s not only for nerds but the facts speak for themselves: there is a "classless" version that simply styles all basic HTML tags. No additional classes needed.
Now, I am trying to tweak a few things such as aligning the date-stamp to the right.
I neither want nor need something complicated. Since the idea is to have a minimal engine to publish byte-sized content every now and then, I want to follow suit with the styling and not spend countless hours trying to get it perfect. It has to be simple, and easy to implement. (Wishful thinking!)
I will certainly look into minimalistic CSS solutions out there. I have almost no skills in that area and I know how painful it is to test and have it right. Been there, done that.
After a decade or two, I am back to hand-crafting an HTML page.
Today, I am prototyping the very page of this project: a list of memos. (That is so meta.) It turns out bare HTML is still as easy as pie, styling is the real deal.
I like the concept of leaving a log of short entries on a regular basis.
I am not so good at publishing blog posts frequently, somehow the barrier is too high for me.
Let´s try with a shorter form, and also because it´s fun to explore project ideas.
Stand-alone, short, and sweet entries following the idea of micro-blogging, but why follow the arbitrary limit of 136 characters? I will keep them short but that´s because I want to.