I've Built a Damn Website!
So having written a little about how I've built this site, I thought I'd write about why I've started this site.
Over the last year or so I've built a handful of websites for family and others. These have been built in established website builders like Wix and Squarespace, and honestly those things don't require a great deal of technical knowledge. I mean, setting up the domain name and hosting and so forth can be a complete ball-ache, but building the sites themselves is pretty straightforward. I guess that's the whole raison d'être of those sites.
Secondly, my partner works in digital marketing and social media management. On a number of occasions with her work, she had turned to me for some technical support on sites that she was managing content on for clients. These sites were built across a range of services, Wix again, WordPress using Elementor, and others. Increasingly I was running up against issues that I was finding hard to resolve due to custom code sitting under those sites, and quickly running up against the limits of my minimal knowledge.
So what all of this began to pique my interest in how to build (or even just fix) what lies beneath those structures. To find out what are the bones that the flesh of these sites hangs off? (slightly macabre analogy ,sorry).
Its's been a long time since I dived in to trying to learn a wholly new skill set from scratch, and this seemed an ideal skill to try and tackle. It doesn't require much financial cost or investment, I can approach it at my own pace, as and when free time allows, and hopefully had a learning curve that wasn't too steep initially so as to seem overwhelming.
On a broader basis I've increasingly been put off by the big social media sites out there. I've never really got anything particularly worthwhile out of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al. The companies themselves have become increasingly toxic, especially Twitter/X in recent years, and even though they are places where I find myself wasting lots of time, more and more they are not places where I particularly (strong>want to waste time. Nevertheless I find myself maintaining a presence there - some of this is unavailable. My kids scouting group communicate through their Facebook page. I need an X account for my professional day-job needs. So in some ways they're unescapable.
But there does seem to be another way. The first prompter of this was making the move to Mastodon. I have neither a large following there, nor follow a huge amount of people. But increasingly that's where I'm finding things that interest me, from interesting people. And maybe steadily that's where I'll share stuff too, interesting or not.
From there I've picked up loads of discussion and articles about the growth of the 'indie-web', and the resurgence of personal websites. It's odd really, but as a nearly-50 year old, I came of age during the first great wave of personal websites, of the popular boom of the internet, of Geocities, and blogging on and so on. But largely let them was over me without getting involved. But maybe not this time. Discovering this flourishing community of personal sites of blogs, of people just posting what they want to post, and most importantly doing this on a site they own, even if that means posting to a smaller audience has been really enjoyable. The idea of owning what you create and who you are on the internet - not letting someone else own it, is really appealing. I guess that's the drive behind the POSSE movement too.
So all of that was just sort of marinading away in my head, as a thing I maybe, sorta, oughta get round to.
And all this was finally given some impetus by a blog post from Louie Mantia. That blog post was 'How to make a Damn Website'. Published back in March, I think I found It around mid-May. In that post Louie only talks a little about why you should build a website, but really helpfully to me, talks at length, and simply, about how to build a damn website. And it seemed, from how Louie described it, as something that I could actually do.
It's easy to forget how simple a website can be. A website can be just one page. It doesn't even need CSS. You don't need a content management system like Wordpress. All you have to do is write some HTML and drag that file to a server over FTP.
For years people have tried to convince us that this is the "hard" way of making a website, but in reality, it may be the easiest.
And so I started to do it. I followed Louie's instructions and built a website.
Well, not of all his instructions, and not all at once. I played around with it in unpublished html files for a while before registering this domain and actually
But the important thing about that post was that it got me started. It really is just a great post. So Mr. Mantia, if you ever happen to read this, thank you
Since then I've realised just how much there is to learn, how many place there are to learn this stuff, and how many people there are willing to share what they know to help others learn. Were I to start doing this all over, or giving advice to someone else doing the same, I would certainly point them towards the newly published web-book 'HTML for People' by Blake Watson. This takes the themes from Louis post, and runs with them, delivering a beautifully presented, detailed and easy to follow guide to anyone wanting to learn some HTML and build a webpage. It's free, it appears to be an absolute labour of love and I don't think I could recommend it highly enough.
The response to the book seems to have been really positive, and rightfully so. It's been fun seeing people react to it the same way and use it as their springboard to start doing this too. In the spirit of the web as place built on links, I'll shout a fellow Steve (of sorts) doing the same thing, Estebantxo. It's heartening to know there are others just starting out doing this, when so many other seem to have been doing it for half a lifetime.
So that's it really, that's kind of why and how I'm doing this. I'm literally just typing this up in Apple Notes, pasting it into a HTML file, and uploading it to a server. And in doing so I've built a damn website.
The Walking Dead..live...again.
Ah. The Walking Dead TV show. Like it's titular protagonists, it just never quite really dies, does it?
I had intended to give up on The Walking Dead, I really had. I'd been with the show since the minute Rick Grimes woke up, way back in Season 1 in 2010(!). The first few series were truly excellent, and that quality stayed high right up until somewhere until Season 6 or 7. (Why'd they have to do Abraham dirty like that??) Still I stuck with it through Rick's departure in Season 9, and even as the show limped on to its anticlimactic conclusion with Season 11. It seems I was one of very few, as the shows viewer numbers cratered after Season 7.
I had high hopes for the first spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, debuting as it did whilst the main series was riding high. The initial premise of following a dysfunctional family navigating the early days of the outbreak was appealing But by series 3 that show too staggered off into convoluted, confusing and incoherent storylines (Daniels Alzheimers/fugues state/PTSD??) and failed to keep it's best characters (John Dorie!). Still, ever the glutton for punishment I persisted with that show too, for all 8 increasingly pointless seasons.
So that was it, after 13 years, and 20 seasons of TV, I was finally finished with The Walking Dead. Put a pointy thing through my head, I was done.
…
But then AMC went and released a min-series, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. Shit title aside, I was curious, against my better judgement, to see just what exactly happened to Rick after that bridge exploded. The answer turned out to not be particularly exciting, but was well enough told and it was good to see Rick back. With that last dangling plot line finally tied up, I was happy to let this particularly zombie universe rest.
…
Then of course AMC released another mini-series The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. And well, another six episodes won't hurt. After all, who wouldn't be intrigued by Daryl Dixon, in France, escorting a nun and her zombie apocalypse messiah nephew (obviously!) to the Mont St. Michel. I was.
And well, it was actually pretty good. And now there's a season 2, and I appear to be back in again. Damn you everliving zombieswalkers!….
Some small Mastodon updates
Just a couple of small behinds the scenes updates this week, both related to my Mastodon profile.
Verifying this site and linking it to my Mastodon profile was first up. This is really simple, just a single line of code added to the head element of my homepage, like so;
<a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@thisstevejames">Mastodon></a>
That's it, and now my site can be verified and linked to my profile.
Next up was author attribution. Now don't get me wrong, I certainly don't class myself as a 'Author' author. But if I post something that I've written here on to Mastodon - or god-forbid, someone else reads something I've written and decides to share it - then it makes sense to be identified as the person who wrote it.
This was new to Mastodon v4.3, and I only came across it after someone shared a post from Robb Knight linking to his blog post on how to set-up Author Attribution.
That too is really simple, and I was already logged in to update my website verification, it was a simple scroll down to find the section to add this website to the Author Attribution section. Once I'd added the address of this website it was just a matter of adding another line of code to my header.
<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@thisstevejames@mastodon.social"></a>
Now (or at least when -or if - a moderator approves it) only stuff that I write on this site can, or will, be attributed to me. Neat.
Now I've just got too keep writing…
* Note - The original version of this post didn't contain the code snippets referred to above, as I could't get them to display despite being inside a 'code' element. So, TIL how to escape the angle brackets using HTML character entities. Which meant that I also learnt that HTML character entities are a thing!
Rebuilding the site
Favourite Things: NetNewsWire
Monday, 12th September 2024
I've written briefly on here about how much I like RSS, and having finally got around to sorting the RSS feed for this site, this seems like as good a time as ever to write about my favourite RSS reader - NetNewsWire.
It's been over 11 years since Google shut down its RSS feed-reading tool, Google Reader, citing a lack of use and interest in RSS feeds. You can read all about that here
Already a decade old at that point, the RSS protocol seemed too young to be sun-setted so early in life and fortunately, as it passes 25 years old, that seems to be the case.
Increasingly RSS seems to be having something of a mini-renaissance of late. Whilst Google Reader's demise may have been seen as the precursor of the decline of RSS, it appears that removing the super-predator from the food-chain has in fact allowed the ecosystem to flourish, and today there are a host of excellent feed aggregators and readers in the market. From Newsblur, to Feedbin, to Feeder and to Feedly there's something for everyone.
Feedly has emerged as probably the forerunner amongst these offerings, sharply positioning itself as the best alternative in the aftermath of Google Reader's collapse. Now though, judging from its website it seems to be pivoting to chase the lucrative enterprise market, selling itself as a way to monitor 'threat intelligence' and'market intelligence'. Meh.
At the other end of the spectrum, the other factor driving the resurgence of RSS is the re-emergence of the open, indie web. As a way of staying engaged with a whole range of independent writers and creators doing their thing on home-made, self-funded, and often brilliant websites, RSS is unparalleled.
The ability to have a feed of content - of interesting things to read - that you develop and curate yourself, and isn't just some shit-stream of algorithmically-determined, AI-generated ad-inserted slop, is increasingly valuable.
This is where an RSS reader comes into it's own, and of the many I've tried I've long since settled in with my favourite, NetNewsWire by Brent Simmons. In keeping with the open web ethos, NetNewsWire is open source and free. So free in fact that I couldn't actually find a way to even make a donation to support the app!
On the subject of the open web, the site FAQs explain;
We support the open web. The big social networking sites are damaging society and eroding democracy - and we believe one of the ways out of this is to get our news via the open web rather than from Twitter and Facebook. NetNewsWire is part of repairing the web we lost and it's part of building the web we want. That future web should not include viral hate speech, abuse, massive corporate surveillance, or successful influence operations by hostile governments and entities opposed to democracy.
This isn't a review of the app, so I'm not going to list all it's features and/or shortcomings and compare it to the alternatives on the market.
You can use it to import all your RSS service accounts, from OldReader, Feedly, FreshRSS or wherever. Or you can do what I do and subscribe directly to individual fees and sync them all through iCloud. (Probably a good time to mention that NetNewsWire is available macOS and iOS only).
You can sort your feeds by folder, by read and unread, and you can mark articles as favourites. All the essentials that you need, and no cruft or bloat.
It's a native Mac app, written entirely in Swift, with a simple three-pane design on Mac and a clean single pane view on iOS.
It's just a great RSS reader.
In explaining why NetNewsWire is a free app, Simmons wrote;
Could the do-it-for-love era — with the creative freedom that that brings — bring us back to the days when we downloaded apps that weren’t from Facebook and Starbucks and Funded Company X, and we told our friends about our exciting finds?
I hope. I have hope.
So here's me, telling my friends about an exciting find. Go try it.
Adding Fediverse Links
Thursday, 29th August 2024
Lot's going on with this page at the moment as I slowly work through redesigning the entire page, again.
Honestly, I think this might just be a constant ongoing thing, everytime I learn some new HTML or CSS feature and want to incorporate it into the page.
Todays update though, is the simple addition of two little icons linking to my Mastodon and Pixelfed profiles.
I'm new to both services, especially Pixelfed as of mere days ago, but increasingly think that there (and here) is where I'll be on the internet going forward.
Like most, i have a Facebook profile, and an Instagram profile, and inevitably now a Threads profile. But using Meta services continually just feels...eugh? Instagram used to be a really nice way to share and explore interesting photography, and now it's just...not. It just feels like a short-form Facebook, and I don't realluy want that. So here's hoping Pixelfed can be more liek Instagram was in the pre-Meta, iOS-only days.
Learning with Codecademy
Monday, 29th July 2024
I'll probably write more at a later date about why I wanted to start learning to write html, and to build this website. For now, this is a little bit of how I'm learning to build it.
I've said before that I know absolutely nothing about how to code. I've never formally studied coding or programming. I didn't study computer science or anything similar at university, and my day job is far removed from this field.
Everything I've created on here, I've learnt how to do recently, and am self-taught. Not self-taught in the sense of just making it up from first principles, obviously.
And not really in the sense of just looking up how to do this on random internet sites (but there has been some of that).
Primarily, I'm working my way through an online course, and applying the elements that I'm learning on that course to this site, bit by bit. There's a number of sites offering similar courses and resources,
but I'm currently using Codecademy. I'd like to say Codecademy was chosen after exhaustive research and comparison, but the truth there was a bit of that,
but primarily when I signed up they had a really good value deal on, which meant I paid something less than half the normal price.
The Codecademy course I'm following, and they have plenty to pick from but this one seemed most appropriate, is titled 'Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and GitHub Pages'.
So far, (exactly 57% in) it's doing exactly what it says on the tin. It has taken me from creating a plain html text document with essentially nothing more than the equivalent of printing 'Hello World' to this stage so far, where hopefully this site has some colour, some structure, some media content, however basic it all might be.
Generally, the course has been really good at delivering a well-structured learning path where each element follows a logical progression from the next, without too much assumed knowledge on the part of the learner.
There's been a couple of points where it's seemed to skip to something that hasn't been entirely clear, but honestly, it might just be that I missed something. Where the odd gap has popped up I've usually been able to work it out, with the help of some judicious Googling.
What it has done so far, is give me a base line to work from so that when I've been searching for how to do something that hasn't been featured in the course yet - like adding this sites favicon - the results of that search have made sense, and I can work out roughly how it all fits together.
Overall, it's been an enjoyable experience so far, and albeit without any previous to compare it too, I'd recommend the Codecademy course. The is definitely not an advertorial though!
The biggest issue so far has been finding time to fit it in around all of life's other commitments, but I just remember that is is a marathon not a sprint, and it's supposed to be fun!
Background Work
Thursday, 18th July 2024
It's been a few days since I've been able to update here, or to update the site. I've been away for a few days with the day job, and then life just generally happened and ate up the spare time I have to do this.
Not to say I haven't been busy here just not been able to make as much progress as I'd like. Not to say though, that I haven't made any progress at all.
In the background, I've gone back and re-worked the structure of the sites files, to something that makes a little more sense and will hopefully be more wieldy as the site grows. I'd been tossing all the blog entry pages into one folder, and it was already looking untidy, so I've built a new hierarchy for them.
Also looking untidy was most of the html code I'd already written. Because I was so busy trying to figure out what I actually needed to write, I'd not given much attention to how I'd written much of it. As such much of it looked messy, with slack indentation and nesting and so on.
This was especially making it tricky to go back in and see in the code where I needed to add for change elements.
So, I've pretty much gone back in and rewritten all of the code for the homepage and blog page ,and for the template for blog entries so it's just a lot tidier.
I guess a complete rewrite of a site is probably something to do when it's alit more mature, but hey, you can't build on poor foundations, right?
That gave me the chance to add a few new things along the way, a change of fonts, some layout changes, adding a little colour etc. I'm not saying this is by any means the finished design of the site, and certainly not that I'm any sort of designer.
But foe now it gives me a little more structure to use, as I try out new techniques and code ideas that I learn along the way. Including little things already, like adding a basic favicon to the site. Because who doesn't love favicons!
It's also given me a long list of 'how do I do X or Y?'' questions that I've picked up along the way, and that's the most interesting part. The first of those is probably, how i do create a persistent menu for all these blog entries that doesnt require creating new relative link from each page, depending on the hierarchy the html file is in?
Homepage Changes
Sunday, 7th July 2024
A fairly slow few days to be honest. Not much to see here on the blog entries, but I've been making a few changes to the layout of the Homepage.
Nothing major at this stage, but my last few lessons have been on the box model, and introducing padding, borders, margins etc to text elements, so I wanted to play around with that a little.
To practice that I wanted to be able to add boxes of colour to frame the text in, and that led me to want to frame the homepage elements to add text in different places rather than just one monoblock of text.
That led me down a rabbit hole to figuring out that you could create 'divs' that could 'floatleft' or 'floatright', and before long the page started to take shape.
Which of of course means that I now want to completely reconfigure the blog entry template that i've only just made...
Tidying Up
Tuesday, 2nd July 2024
Just a little tidying up today. So little tidying up in fact that it's hopefully not even visible.
As I've been adding blog entries, I've just been dropping them into a folder, creatively titled 'Blog'.
That was fine, but as i've started to add CSS files and images, and some font files, it's started to get a bit messy.
So todays task was going in and tidying that all up a little to something thats a bit more manageable,
and importantly more sustainable as the files and resources sitting behind the site grow.
The next tasks on the list are to put together a template HTML file for thes blog entries.
That way I can just do this writing bit, without writing all the code around it each time.
Then it's probably time to fancy it up a bit with some more CSS. And maybe, just maybe, some RSS?