I get banned a lot because of accidentally using words that have become problematic when I wasn’t looking. How about we just stop letting extremists claim all the perfectly good words and symbols instead?

Lolth my queen 💅

Y’know what maybe I will. Fuelled by the power of irritation I’ll try and fix it. If anyone’s reading this in a few months and the header tags are in a logical order; you’re welcome

Did you feel comfortable searching to learn how to use GIMP?

I found a Stack Overflow thread where people discuss this and actually test it. Further down the page is a 2026 test. The results are it’s basically the same, very little practical difference in normal usage. If you’re auto saving a file every 30 seconds you will not notice any difference between XML and JSON.

Personally, I like XML more for data files like this. I would not reach for JSON as my first thought for deserealizing a complex object hierarchy. Stuff like, a polygon can have a drawing of type vector which can have n paths which each have exactly 2 points… easy to store and validate in XML. Quite messy and complicated in JSON.

<Drawing type="polygon">
  <Line color="#fed1aa">
    <Point x="6" y="7" />
    <Point x="69" y="420" />
  </Line>
</Drawing>

I got irritated by the differences, but I was more irritated by Microslop, so it was the lesser of two irritants. I mostly figured it out eventually. Finding H2 is always at the bottom of the entire style list though for some fucking reason like there’s no excuse for that kind of mild irritation

No offence, but I don’t feel like this thread is the right place for any kind of rational discussion. You can use your imagination for what the mod removed comments contained

All I hear is personal attacks. How is it disgusting privilege to just live my life? Your life would be exactly the same if you didn’t open the news. It’s just the news cycle preying on your sense of injustice and impotent rage for clicks and money. There’s literally nothing you can do to stop a country on the other side of the world from doing stuff. And being snarky and hostile to neutral parties isn’t going to gather you any more support or sympathy.

Nice username by the way. Bonus points for irony

What are you on about lol

Yes let’s shoot lasers wildly into the æther, great idea. Green ones too, the most pilot-blinding wavelength. This just in: birds and bees also allergic to lasers. This is some mad scientist shit.

You got a problem, mate? Or you just going to be passive aggressive via emoji?

Not the same person. I don’t read the news, and I try not to watch genocides. I’m poorly informed about most politics and pretty happy about it to be honest. Sounds like they should probably stop genociding, that’s usually a bad thing to do. But I’m not going to pretend I know what’s actually happening over there or that I can do anything about it.

They still have a good export tool, that’s a reliable canary for enshittification in my experience. See: how Google butchered their export tools to be as annoying as possible for “security” reasons. The harder it is to leave, the more they care about trapping you via friction rather than keeping you via good customer experience

Is it bad to reply to 2 week old comments? I thought it was fine here

Sure, I’m typing it out on my phone though so excuse any mistakes:

# build.sh
php build.php

// build.php
<?php

// Just contains all the directory definitions and utilities in one place
require once __DIR__ . './bootstrap.php';
require once __DIR__ . './utils.php';

// Static assets
ensureDir(DIST_DIR);
copy_all_files(ASSETS_DIR, DIST_DIR);

$files = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(
    new RecursiveDirectoryIterator(PAGES_DIR)
);

// Build each page
foreach ($files as $file) {
    if ($file->isDir()) continue;
    $path = $file->getPathname();

    // only build .php pages (skip partials)
    if (!str_ends_with($path, '.php')) continue;

    $relative = str_replace('pages/', '', str_replace(SRC_DIR . '/', '', $path));
    $output = str_replace('.php', '/index.html', $relative);

    echo $relative . "\n";
    if ($relative == 'index.php') {
        $outputPath = DIST_DIR . '/index.html';
    }
    else if (str_ends_with($output, 'index/index.html')) {
        $output = str_replace('index/index.html', 'index.html', $output);
        $outputPath = DIST_DIR . '/' . $output;
    }
    else {
        $outputPath = DIST_DIR . '/' . $output;
    }

    ensureDir(dirname($outputPath));
    ob_start();
    include $path;
    $html = ob_get_clean();

    echo $outputPath . "\n";
    file_put_contents($outputPath, $html);
}

echo "Build complete\n";

// utils.php

function ensureDir($path) {
    if (!is_dir($path)) {
        mkdir($path, 0777, true);
    }
}

function copy_all_files($source_dir, $target_dir) {
    $dir_obj = opendir($source_dir);
    @mkdir($target_dir);
    while ($file = readdir($dir_obj)) {
        if ($file != "." && $file != "..") {
            if (is_dir($source_dir . "/" . $file)) {
                copy_all_files($source_dir . "/" . $file, $target_dir . "/" . $file);
            } else {
                copy($source_dir . "/" . $file, $target_dir . "/" . $file);
            }
        }
    }
    closedir($dir_obj);
}

<?php
define('ROOT_DIR', __DIR__);
    define('DIST_DIR',  ROOT_DIR . '/dist');
    define('SRC_DIR',   ROOT_DIR . '/src');
        define('PAGES_DIR',     SRC_DIR . '/pages');
// etc

I stripped out all the database stuff because as my site grew I kept expanding on it and I needed a database.

Mine will also probably be longer than average because I wanted fancy stuff like my source pages being just “about.php” instead of “about/index.php”, but I wanted the output to be “about/index.html” so it got way more complicated than it needed to be. But again most of those lines in the for loop are just me being obsessive compulsive about my own directory structure 😂. I also didn’t count the utilities functions in my original line count because to me that’s equivalent of importing a module; I didn’t write that file, I just copy pasted it from online. You could probably find a simpler build script online.

<?php
$pageTitle = 'Example';
?>

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <?php include PARTIALS_DIR . '/head.php'; ?>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/example.css" />
</head>
<body>
    <?php include PARTIALS_DIR . '/header.php'; ?>
    <?php include PARTIALS_DIR . '/noscript.php'; ?>
    <main>
        <h1>example</h1>
    </main>

    <?php include PARTIALS_DIR . '/footer.php'; ?>
    <?php include PARTIALS_DIR . '/global-scripts.php'; ?>
</body>
</html>

I guess I just really like HTML. Any excuse to write actual HTML makes me happy

That nginx thing looks pretty cool! Very neat (if using nginx).

In the second half you’re talking about dynamic imports right? Like fetching the html with JS and then loading that? I try and avoid doing that for various reasons

How is PHP a vulnerability if it never leaves your machine and you only use it to build the HTML?

Oh yeah I guess… but in my experience non-tech people can’t even manage a .txt file asset directory, so Markdown is far too complicated for them.

The original article was advocating for manually typing out your .html .js and .css files. Like just complete raw dog it 90’s style, which is even harder for most people, so I kind of just assumed tech knowledge.

Anything short of a clicky-draggy online interface or asking Claude to do it is generally outside the reach of most non-tech people. I don’t think any average bloggers are going to become front-end developers just to start their blog; I basically just completely ignored that part of the article because it’s kind of insane. So my comments have been targeted towards people with at least mild programming knowledge.

If you’re hand typing out .html anyway, it’s like a 5 minute additional process to set up PHP and copy a build script online. That way you’re still sticking to the “fundamentals” as closely as possible, in this context raw assets, but now you have the power of imports and other cool stuff if you need it. I do agree with that part of the article. People are too willing to jump in to any which framework because they’re popular, when in most cases the amount of frameworks you need is zero. Just write some articles and you’ll know what you need after 10.

My problem with stuff like 11ty is that, in theory, it’s good. It abstracts away the HTML. But to actually use it, you have to understand HTML anyway; and at that point, why the middleman? Just write HTML. The second you need an <article> tag or a <section> or an <aside> or a <nav> or a <ul> of <a>nchor tags but some of them are external so they need the noref shit… you get my drift. You end up writing HTML inside your markdown, but now you are finagling two different languages. I don’t really see how # is much simpler than <h1> anyway.