Explanations about the design of my website
Why choosing a cheap interface
Some like their website to be impressive, full of colors and animations.
Some like their website to be functional, light-weighted and easy to edit.
That’s why I don’t need Wordpress, or any plugin. This website is only pure text. Here’s the list of things I enjoy about that.
Easy to edit
Markdown is the most easy to use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. So I don’t need any preview, or any framework to see what’s going to happen after I did some modification. No fuss.
Efficient
You don’t really need those animations in your website, do you ? Just get clear and styled information.
Fast
Access this website even with H+ or a bad 3G connexion.
Sticking to HTML
Markdown is really near to HTML, and simpler is better.
How to do that - current version
I use a static website generator: Hugo. It transforms the markdown to html and generates the pages automatically. There are a lot of interesting features in it : auto reloading etc… The best thing about hugo is that hosting is really easy. I’m currently hosting it with Gitlab Pages but I could have done it myself.
How to do that - old & tricky edition
This objective is a bit unique. When I’m writing an article, I only want to edit local markdown files and push changes.
What follows may cause you heart attacks, it’s really dirty. Be warned.
Hosting
The code is hosted on Github.
The website in hosted on a personal server, a Raspberry Pi.
The webserver is simply nginx (I use it as a reverse proxy).
I use a personal domain name that points to the Raspy with a simple A field on the DNS zone.
Markdown
Of course, as browsers cannot read directly markdown (what a shame!). I used the python package md_to_html to convert them in html.
Automatization
But I realized it wasn’t optimal. Every time I made changes to the local markdown files, they needed to be done on the server html files too! So I (don’t judge me please) scheduled md to html conversions with cron every 5 min. This cron also pull changes. Still not optimal. This looks like an ugly CI but it does the job.
CSS
I added a simple CSS template to my main folder. But the CSS file needed to be included in all the html files. For that, I used a small python script that locates the <head> and insert the <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css"> code snippet.
And added this to the cron.