New Year, New Blog
So, in the late days of the year 2023 I decided to go back to blogging again. But then you run in the problem that every IT professional has when it comes to this: What blogging platform will I use or build to do this?
It's yet another recipe for procrastionation. Surveying all kinds of platforms. Common tool like Wordpress? Simple CMS like Grav? Or one of the many, many static site generators? (I'm using Hugo on other sites, but maybe something that isn't a huge binary?)
And then the many options and languages for a DIY solution.
This could take another few weeks, so I decided to do something entirely different: Let's build this step by step and in public.
First Day: Handwritten HTML
What's the minimal requirement for a blog page? Probably one index.html with a blog article.
Okay, that's rather unstructured and might just what we called a "web page" in the distant past.
So let's add something more: A index page listing all the articles.
You tend to see this more often, at least for minimalistic blogs. Instead of the last n articles on the main entry page, there's a chronological list of all of them, with each entry on its own page.
Or in our case, one additional page with our first blog entry (what you're reading right now)
In the olden days, you had all kinds of multple posts per page: Your main entry page, archive pages for a specific month etc. As this resulted in a lot of different static files for the same content, it was a primary reason why you went with a dynamically generated blog, e.g. using PHP. Let's not do this.
And because we're not bad netizens, let's add yet another handwritten thing: Our RSS feed page.
Status Quo
Other news
I'll try to post something not as meta each day.
Today, it's another New Year thing I've decided to do: For January, I'm trying to skip most sources of videos or podcasts.
The only online sources I'm allowing myself are the ones I'll have to pay for anyway: German public broadcasting.
As a tax-paying citizen, I'm paying for multiple TV and radio stations. And a few of them also have "Mediatheken" (lit. "media library") where I can see movies and TV series asynchronously. Plus quite a few podcasts.
The state of German TV isn't that good, so I don't expect to see a lot of good shows. And the foreign films are mostly available in the usual bad German dubbing. But hey, not consuming as much media is one part of the motivation behind this.