blog hosts and not going insane

[gloomhaunter]

i'd like to start off by saying that i am already aware of the other posts that pose similar questions to mine, but i figured i would make my own topic thread regardless because...i don't actually have a very good reason now that i think of it. really just wanted ot hit that juicy "new topic" button. ah. the horrors.

i'm looking to start a website (wow! surprise!) and i want to host it on neocities. love neocities. can't get enough of it. i already have plenty of ideas for how i'm going to be incredibly annoying about it, and foremost on the list is including a blog--what better way is there to showcase my wildly unstable personality than through a blog? fortunately for everyone who will ever be blighted by my future website's existence, i'm fairly regular about taking my mood stabilizers, god forbid i actually have a breakdown. #mentalhelth

so, my question is, what do you suggest i do to actually implement this blog? there's always the good old fashioned option of just individually adding each post to an increasingly absurdly long page and making everyone deal with it, but i would rather not complicate things unnecessarily. i've heard of zonelets, but how it works has managed to fly over my head, which isn't exactly surprising but does not bode well for me or my unborn blog baby. i considered embedding a tumblr blog rss feed, but that didn't have the desired effect when i tried (no matter how much i messed with the code for the widget) so that appears to be out the window. there has to be some way i have failed to consider. i'm hoping one of you has a solution that i somehow missed and will feel stupid about later magical fix for me, or personal experiences to share, or even just mutually bemoaning the process of uploading any large quantity of folders to the neocities interface would be good

[pagemelt]

You said no to zonelets, so I’m not sure how you’d feel about it, but I’ve had good luck with 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/), which is a static site generator. It can be a lot to begin with if you've never used a static site generator before, but it’s incredibly well-documented (https://www.11ty.dev/docs/get-started/), and it has a lot of projects you can duplicate and play around with instead of having to start from scratch (https://www.11ty.dev/docs/starter/). This starter blog might be a good candidate for you https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-base-blog). You can follow the instructions in the readme on GitHub, or you could start with one that’s already up and running on Glitch (https://glitch.com/edit/#!/denim-knowing-tax), so you can get in there and just start poking around.

Basically the blog posts themselves are written in markdown, and 11ty uses a templating language to pass your content into the right places of your layout. This way, when you decide you want to change your layout, you only have to make the change in one place. So in your project, you’ll have files that end in .md, and what 11ty does is take those files and spit out regular old .html and .css files that are stored in a new /pub directory. So to get your site onto Neocities, you’d just upload those /pub files.

11ty was how I managed my reading log (https://pagemelt.neocities.org/projects/booklog/) for a while, before I realized that an individual .md file for each and every book was way more than I needed.

[wygolvillage]

I personally just use the "super long page" tactic but nest all the posts underneath dropdowns so it's easier to navigate :P I'm also going to organize the pages by year, so once 2024 rolls around I'm going to move all the blog posts from this year to a 2023 page and start fresh on the main page. I've never really used any of the generators since they look more complicated to set up than I'd like.

[crow-queen]

i personally write quite long blog posts on my website, so i have a separate page for each day that i have written on. these are organised in my files by year and then by month, the file name is the date, and then i have a very inefficient script on my index to display the pages for the year in an archive page.
at the end of the year, i will move everything from my index into my 2023 folder and start a fresh index for 2024, with a link to the 2023 index.
i might also play around with the script a little to make it more reusable.

[gloomhaunter]

You said no to zonelets

actually i would be fine with using it but i'm just unsure how to do so--but thank you for the suggestions, i will look into those. also, i noticed you're reading the murderbot diaries. i'm a huge fan of martha wells' books haha, i love seeing murderbot enjoyers in the wild. i really need to get around to making a murderbot blinkie of some sort...

[Memory]

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