June 14th, 2023

Reflections on creating a static html website in 2023

Web development and the internet as a whole have changed dramatically over the last decade plus. When I was in college for my artificial intelligence degree, I had one class on web development. We learned the foundational technologies that over time have given way to the complex technology you find powering the websites of today. Most are built with extensive javascript frameworks, and people call websites built that way web apps because that sounds cooler. And yet, there are still some stubborn people out there who find some incomprehensible joy in doing it the hard way. Writing everything yourself. It may be because of the challenge, or to help foster an understanding of the whole stack, or if it is really incomprehensible then I should not be trying to explain it. Nevertheless, I wanted to do the same. So it was time to make my own website.

The domain name

It should come as no surprise that as a software developer I wanted a .dev top-level domain (TLD). Unlike the popular ones like .com, you can probably still find your own name available with the .dev TLD. At least that was the case when I wrote this blog article. The pattern first letter of first name + entirety of last name is one you are no doubt familiar with. Businesses love using this combination for the email addresses of their employees. My name is Joe Weel, and I have had multiple jweel@company addresses or accounts. It came as a surprise, however, when the domain registrar I was looking up domain names on told me that jweel is a misspelling of jewel. Cue existential crisis. So instead, I used only my last name for the domain. I would find out a few weeks later that the literal day after I purchased the domain, the domain registrar was sold. But that's next year's problem.

Hosting

I may have learned about web infrastructure and setting up a web server in college, but nowadays none of that is necessary when you can just find a random web hosting service where you can put your content and have them handle everything else. In some cases, as long as web traffic is low enough, they even host for free. The most difficult thing in this whole process for me, having somehow avoided it my entire career, was finally giving in and installing node.js. But I knew that day would come eventually, so might as well be now. Download some scripts, use them to push some html, and website is up.

Content

Barebones html and css, no scripting, no cookies. That's my thought process at the onset of my new website. Of course what that means is fiddling with placement for hours. I spend the next day tinkering with css files because I am too stubborn to use some existing template. If you have ever done the same, this is the moment where you realise why all those javascript packages are so popular. Apparently, simplicity is a time suck.