wffl

vaguely burnt

  • it/its

I do stuff; pfp by spicymochi



simply because a) it's fun b) zola is annoying c) NIH.

a part of me wants to make it dynamic (i.e. it's a literal web server), but is this truly necessary? being dynamic potentially allows fun stuff, like having ?at=hash to view an old version of a post. but... I'm not sure if I'll ever actually implement anything like this (besides I'm not sure ?at is actually fully possible, because I will inevitably change something in the engine so that the old version can't be rendered...).

I also wanted to make slugs similar to what cohost has -- some short unique id (it can be really short, given than I don't post much lol) and then anything, just for making links readable. This is also something that's only really possible with a dynamic blog (and is thus a bit scary! -- what happens if I want to switch to being static later? do I care about links being alive in the future?).

but then like... using github pages is somewhat nice. I don't like them much, but it's nice that I don't need any hosting and me breaking my vps won't make the blog inaccessible. so maybe I should stick to being static?.. could the traffic ever overwhelm my teeny-tiny vps?

aaaaaaaa so many questions without clear answers.

being dynamic sounds fun, but is probably more work for little to no benefit. I'm conflicted...

do y'all have any thoughts?


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in reply to @wffl's post:

I too tried to use Zola and was then frustrated by how limited it was. I am a big proponent of https://astro.build/ if u can stand Javascript. Not entirely clear about its server-side capabilities, but as a static site generator it is my favorite in terms of how it makes the flexibility/enforced structure tradeoffs. Generating custom slugs for pages is entirely within its wheelhouse (https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/content-collections/), ?at=hash maybe not as much. also it does use React-style syntax for its templates, which was a turn-on for me (i dislike Jinja-style), but may be weird for others.

heavy agree of Github pages being nice because it is so "fire n forget", i do not want to have to sysadmin if i dont have to

I'm afraid I can't stand js 🫠

Generating custom slugs for pages is entirely within its wheelhouse

The thing I was talking about slugs is not generating them (that's easy), but making them accept random just, like cohost can: https://cohost.org/wffl/post/5250623-blorbo-jumbo-this-string-after-the-dash-literally-does-not-matter. I don't think you can do this with purely a static site? (unless you move the junk after ? ig...)

I'm still not entirely sure it's a good thing to support, but it sounds fun.

ohhhh yeah static sites are Not Meant to do stuff like that yeah...

that does sound fun but i think also unavoidably moves u into the realm of not only a server, but a Content Management System too (how do you keep the code stable otherwise?)