Handmade Tools

Reply: Handmade Tools

I’ve created handmade hobby/artistic websites in the past (some contained dozens of pages and had custom CSS on every page) and still want to make them, but they’re very laborious to create and maintain, and there’s no separation of site content and site structure. I recently discovered static site generators - exciting stuff, because they segregate structure from content, and allow you to easily build templates for different kinds of content. So that takes a lot of the grunt work out of coding layouts and pages, and makes it much easier to build the kind of arthouse websites that break the conventional visual templates.

I use Jekyll—a ‘staticgen’ like Hugo. I absolutely agree that it gives me flexibility. I don’t think I even realized how much until you mentioned it! I have been kind of hard on it lately, because my customizations are starting to cause me a lot of pain. And it’s just not a good way to do Indieweb things right now. I keep shopping for a new program; I think it’ll just have to do.

In a way I feel similarly about CSS—it’s pretty expressive and flexible, but it really strains when I try to do something complex with it. Actually, I just struggle to speak its language. So what you’re saying about handmade sites being ‘laborious’ is dead on. It’s rewarding when it’s done.

Oh and I really like Codepen. Here’s a prototype I built before diving in. Thank you for asking—I appreciate that.

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