In my case (not necessarily your case, of course), the cheapest selling-point has become that I already have a browser open for almost everything else, so that’s one less thing to install and check in on. But it’s also easier to keep up to date reading when individual computers have problems and usually has a nicer API for scripting, if you need that sort of thing.
John Colagioia
Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023
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2·15 days agoThat’s close to how I think about it, yeah, but I’d push more in terms of the investment. Since Jekyll, Hugo, Svelte, Eleventy, and the rest just generate flat HTML to upload, there’s nothing wrong with using it for a single page. But you end up needing to learn the whole build-and-deploy process and all the layout quirks, which (especially if you’re starting from scratch) will take longer to get the page out. And like you point out, the more material you have, the better that investment looks.
But then, if you already know the system, there’s no new investment, so it becomes more of a toss-up whether to build things that way, since a page of Markdown is slightly faster to write than the equivalent HTML.
Personally, after churning through all the static site generator options, I landed on Jekyll, one of the first of them. It’s definitely not the sexiest solution, but it’s Markdown-in and HTML-out (my main page is still raw HTML/CSS from like twenty years ago, though), was the easiest for me to match the styling that I wanted from the base theme, and it’s been along for long enough that it’s mostly surprise-free.
That said, if you only want the equivalent of a business card, I might argue that setting up anything is probably overkill, all overhead for just a tiny bit of content. In that case, you can grab some modern-ish HTML boilerplate like this one, then use Pandoc to convert the Markdown (which you presumably already know if you’re messing with Hugo) to the HTML that goes between
<body>and</body>in the boilerplate. Add CSS, and you’re done.Oh, and actually, depending on how broadly you want just the “business card” idea, something like Littlelink might also fit your needs, where you hack out the links that you don’t care about and fill in destinations for the rest.
I developed this script for creating permanent/static archives of social media exports, so it’s not a full solution - not a web service, expects file inputs, uses a probably incomplete list of shorteners to avoid pulling real pages - but it along with the
shorteners.txtfile in the same repository, iterating to find a domain not on the list, might at least inspire a solution, if it’s not good for your specific cases.
I buy it.
As it turns out, a couple of months ago when a laptop crapped out at an inopportune time, I needed to retreat to a much older machine with barely enough memory to keep a browser running all day. As I tried to work out a recovery plan for the things that didn’t seem properly backed up (they were, just not where I expected them), I remembered that I had a couple of old Raspberry Pi units that I never did much with, and decided that could take the load off of the laptop if I tossed them in the corner.
So far, I have Code Server to substitute for Visual Studio Code, Cryptpad for Libre Office, Forgejo just because I really should have done that a long time ago, Fresh RSS for a rotating list of RSS readers since I dropped my Internet-accessible Tiny Tiny RSS installation, Inf Cloud and Radicale for a calendar/address book, Jellyfin that used to run on the then-in-use old laptop, Snappy Mail for Thunderbird and the bunch of heavy webpages from mail providers, YaCy because I’ve wanted to use it more for many years, and a few others.
Moving onto a more functional computer, I decided to keep the servers running, because the setup works about as well as the desktop setups that I’ve run for years, if I use a few pinned tabs. I’m sure that I’ll scream about it when something goes wrong, but it does the job…
I’m another conflicted person on this. I ran Tiny for years, so I never hated it. But it had so many updates that assumed that I’d know in advance to update something on the system (PHP libraries, database schema, etc.), and then putting the git repository behind Cloudflare led to a cycle of notifications that I needed an update and then waiting for Brigadoon to reemerge so that I could pull the latest source. And any time that I needed to look for a solution to a problem, reading through the forums made me regret the choice a tiny bit more.
It’s reasonable software, but I ended up moving to Fresh RSS on an in-house server, and that has gone better, but I hope that the Tiny community pulls together something better to keep the space diverse.