Neocities.org

Super fun to read your dreamy muse-prose-poem-vision. I especially love the way you describe the water going down and down. And checkov's harpoon guns! A real treat.

I've also been debating moving to some sort of site generator recently, now that I have less time to enjoy fussing around with the details and keeping sections synced. Tempted by the prospect of PHP but might just go the static site generator route to avoid hosting fees for now. Any suggestions or lessons to share?

PHP and SSI are both fantastic if you have them- there's a good bit of that sprinkled around my site (for example: automated rollover of sitelogs is via PHP includes). Eleventy is supposed to be the easiest SSG to learn- I tried, but honestly, I've been happier rolling my own scripts. There's a lot of Python glueing things together before they get uploaded. DIYing it makes the setup make innate sense to me.

Definitely depends how much time you want to spend on it, though, and what you find fun. A SSG almost certainly takes less time to learn than the time it takes to write and debug your own scripts (though it depends on implementation). But rolling my own scripts is enjoyable to me and is indirectly teaching me how SSGs work- I've had to read about them to work out how to implement a very simple version of them myself.

This may also be helpful: https://owlsroost.xyz/articles/2023-12-23-reducing-html-redundancy.html

web1.0hosting.net supports SSI, possible to reuse HTML, much more convenient

Thanks for the tips! And the link to the article I knew you had but couldn't find. I suspect we have similar code-loving system-designing brains so I'm VERY tempted to make my own ssg but I have so little free time with the new job. Might start with eleventy and see if it annoys me enough to write up something that'll paste static bits together for me and convert markdown to html for essays.