Writing webpages by hand

Last week it was pi day. So that day i tinkered a bit with my old raspberry pi, just to burn the dust out of it's circuits. For a project i had in mind, i wanted to boot the pi into the console. Once i was in the quiet of the console, i had no way to look things up on the internet.

It was only yesterday i started experimenting with the text based browser lynx. None of my own sites worked really well in it, because they are mostly images and animations. But even my Supernapie blog was just a blank screen, because it is made with React. Google's homepage seemed to work very well. There are even input fields in the lynx browser, and the search results can be navigated. But on some sites, everything was mangled into something unstructured. Only when the css was applied, you can see what is important. Others started with long lists of meaningless links, that are normally hidden by a fancy flyout menu in a real browser.

This got me thinking: why not design for text based first. It will automatically be mobile first, search engine optimized and easy to navigate with a keyboard.

But you can also do this with a backend? This is true, but there are 3 reasons why i opt out of a backend for this blog:

Github pages only serves static pages and i really like Github pages, because you just push your changes to the repo and your website is live. It is also free.

Working Copy is a git client and code editor on your iPhone. It has a handy preview mode, which means i don't have to push my code to test it. And i can test it even offline. But it is kinda hard to also run a virtual machine or docker with backend code on a phone. Also running webpack or any node build tools is not possible.

The last reason is control. Even though i am just writing text, i can weave some javascript or images or sound or iframes in it. Also i don't find writing html tedious.

So that are some of the ideas behind the system of this blog.