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This is one of the first posts that I wrote for my personal blog, which I hosted on Gitlab. I just wanted to move it over here so that I can preserve how frustrating the whole experience was. Many details are going to be irrelevant to my current Gemini blog.
I did it, I finally fucking did it, I finally started my own blog and before I forget, there is going to a lot of swearing in here so if you want to leave, you do you. The truth is that this is not my first blog, I have started and abandoned many but this is the only one that I have written from scratch by myself. Yeah, that's right, no framework, no nothing just pure HTML and CSS.
Now why would one do that? In a world where services such as Wordpress, Blogger, Write.as, Tumblr make it as easy as making an account to create a blog, why would you want to roll one yourself? And even if you do, why wouldn't you use a simple static site generator (God know how many are there now with many new one's written in Go)
The main reason that I wanted to write everything myself was to keep the whole system simple. When I mean simple here, I don't mean simple as in easy to use, I mean simple as in easy to understand and hold in my head. I can't be bothered with learning a new framework, its idioms, its commands, its deployment etc on top of learning HTML & CSS. Oh I did learn HTML and CSS way back when I was in school but I never had to touch it again or use it to do anything.
I never understood how much of a shitshow CSS was until I tried using it. You can try to paper over shit, but you will still have to get you hands deep in it when some thing breaks. Just give place my shit at a given X and Y, I shouldn't have to float, pad and then pray to Hadad to do this.
Currently this blog is held together by hacks and ducktape (seriously, just read the source code of the index along with the stylesheet). I might be a dumbass who won't do things The Right Way (using grids and flexboxes and what not) but I am just tired and wanted to get my blog up and running. The only thing I am happy about is the art that I mainly sourced from DeviantArt
Now, even though many images and Gif's I used here don't require attribution, I believe in highlighting the people without whom I wouldn't have kept at this enough to crank this shit of a blog out. So here are all the people from whom I have sourced the assets from, ordered by the appearance of their assets in the home page.
[F2U] Study by KittensPurrgatory
Cross Of Lucifer Divider F2U by DreamyDecor
Fire Potion by Planet-Spatulon
And here are all the fonts that I am using
Cooper Hewitt by Chester Jenkins
To drive home how shitty everything really is, here is my experience trying to host my entirely static website somewhere.
I first tried hosting my website on Neocities, I had previously used the same for some random experiments and it seemed to be simplest of them all.
So I created my account and hosted my site. Everything was working fine but then suddenly I was logged out and my site was inaccessible. I tried logging back in, couldn't. Tried resetting my password, couldn't. With nothing else left to try, I left a message and looked for alternative platforms. (Update 30/09/2021: They responded and I got my account back but I didn't want to maintain two identical sites and I also had applied for an account over at flounder.online to host my site over Gemini. I deleted my neocities site.)
Github and Gitlab offers free static site hosting and even though I hate interacting and updating my site using Git, I thought I would try it out. Already was using Gitlab for many things so chose the same. Created a repo, uploaded my assets and pages and it seems that even though my site is entirely static, I would have to use the CI/CD pipeline just to copy all my stuff and make it public. Fuck, this is exactly the kind of over complicated workflow that I was
ranting about. Anyway, I looked up the guide and used the CI config provided there.
No dice, it didn't work, due to some issue, the job was not getting started. I thought I had fucked up somewhere and looked at some of the examples provided, especially the plain HTML example.
Guess what, it didn't fucking work. I was ready to nuke this whole blog and throw my computer out of the window. Thankfully I did one final search to look for other examples. I got another example of plain-html project and I looked at it's CI config.
Lo and behold, there were some things that were not present in all the configs I saw until then. I added the missing stuff and tried again. It worked.
Now think about what just happened and how it might have came about, the guide and the example linked were probably outdated (since the examples had some artifacts already built) and nobody bothered to either remove or update this old guide and thanks to that I lost several hours of my life.
Ideally I should have just been able to upload my static site and make it public (that's how Neocities worked, but then again it was not a git hosting service)
Thank god I didn't go the static site generator route. God knows how much more fiddling I would have had to do to get that working with everything else.