June.08 - Site updates, my struggles with IndieWeb, and Saturday coffee and book!

I got fonts working!

I finally figured out how to host fonts on my own site, so I don't have to access Google Fonts. It turns out that the old directions I'd found online and was following a couple years ago were (sort of?) wrong.

I guess it's difficult for some browsers to properly display certain hosted fonts in a particular format, but if you CONVERT them to something called .woff, then browsers know what to do.

So I downloaded some fonts from dafont.com and converted them using transfonter.org, and suddenly, it worked! HUZZAH! The banner font is called Livingstone. I chose it because I love calligraphy, though I also downloaded a bunch of others (some traditional, some exceedingly funky) so I'm sure I'll have fun experimenting. Note: I think when I publish this, I might have already changed the banner font. Lol. Leaving the comment here for context though - more joy of tinkering.

Right now the body text is Quicksand (downloaded directly from the designer, here on GitHub), and I like the sans-serif-ness of it but I'm not digging how light it is, it's not great on my laptop (though it's nice on the phone). There's a heavier version I'll experiment with.

If you have a favorite sans-serif or serif body text font, feel free to share!
I might go back to Verdana...

Templates, and why static site generators are problematic

I have two templates, one for web pages and one for blog pages. They're nearly the same, just a couple small differences. Comments are very useful! I'm starting to use them to block off bits of code so I have a better idea of what goes where when I want to just start writing.

This little website project is really coming along. I'm working on writing up my workflow and a description of the basic way it's set up, as well as a short list of reasons why I wanted to do this, but all of this writing has to battle with the other writing due for school (I joke to my kids, both in college, that it's my mission to get my Bachelor's before they do), so it'll probably take me a few weeks, but it feels good to start thinking about how to express it all.

The real fiddly bit is making a template and then tending to it, and for that I use little bits of code that help me find and replace chunks of text/code in all my files en masse, so I can adjust the whole site at once. This is a bit tricky and you have to make sure you don't drop a character somewhere, or else you have to find and replace that, and then your night is gone while you painstakingly go through it all with tweezers, setting things right. (Remember! This is fun! 😅)

Theoretically this is the task that a static page generator (like Hugo or Eleventy) would do for me, but that only works if you know how to troubleshoot them when they go wrong. By building my site by hand, if something displays incorrectly, I know I can go straight to the page and find it.

This is partly why IndieWeb was so demoralizing

With Hugo and Eleventy, when something goes wrong, you have to fix the actual generator. Do you know the Go programming language? Do you know any JavaScript? Is it enough to fix Eleventy? This was the main disappointment for me when I tried to get into IndieWeb stuff.

I had people suggesting I learn WordPress (not how to use it, but how to code plugins for it), that I learn Python (tried that - did not enjoy, was not fun), that if I had Go issues then "just check the forums" (I found so many complaints from actual engineers about how unfriendly and off putting the Go help forum was, it was hugely intimidating). In one conversation with four or five people, one person said, "I don't understand why everyone doesn't just learn to code."

I was floored. Yeah, and I don't understand why everyone who wears pants doesn't also get excited about learning how to select fabric and choose a pattern and then download that pattern and cut it out and tape the pieces together, then cut each pattern piece individually out of scrap fabric and then make a toile and then use the advice from at least three different sewing forums and two books on patternmaking to fit the toile, and then start the process over from scratch, this time with the really GOOD linen and using all French seams, but WHADDYA GONNA DO?? PEOPLE, AMIRIGHT?

It felt like the general attitude was, if you want to make websites, you not only need to learn all that, but you obviously must want to, and if you don't, why are you here?

For me the answer was, I'm here because I remember a time when I had fun sitting in my husband's office in 1994, making a bunch of HTML text files, uploading them to omnigroup.com/~hollie, and seeing my little stories and photos show up. That's all I want. Isn't that still possible? Shouldn't I be able to do that without learning Go or JavaScript? [sound of crickets]

All that old tech still works, right? So why not teach people how to use THAT if you want the small web to be accessible? If you want to see "non-techie" people making their own sites? Assuming that's actually the goal?

Why not just have someone else generate that content for you?

I'm referring here to great sites like Pika.page (so awesome!) and Bearblog.dev. I have current accounts at both places. I've said before, and will say again, these are great alternatives to what I'm doing! With both of these, someone else is managing the site generation for you and making sure it runs smoothly. You can tinker a lot with CSS and even some page code to get the design you want.

We used to have things like Dreamweaver, where you could both see the code AND see the output - a "What You See If What You Get" piece of software (where the acronym WYSIYG comes from). You could mess with code, and immediately see what it was doing. A lot of folks learned HTML this way! And that was really fun to use. When Dreamweaver was around, I knew a lot of people who weren't coders or otherwise techie, really get into building their own sites! I miss those days. That was much more accessible.

So why am I trying to do this myself?

Why not use Pika or Bearblog, especially if I already have accounts? Because it isn't just the tinkering that gives me joy, it's also having control of my stuff, and putting things in order - the order that I make, myself, by hand.

There are real benefits to this! So much of our lives are totally uncontrollable. I have a couple chronic illnesses that have wreaked havoc with me for over twenty years. My own body isn't a "safe space". I live with two other adults - I can't perfectly control my environment. Wanting a small space of one's own to just endlessly fiddle and tweak and put things in order is a very human joy as well as a very human coping mechanism. For crissakes, this is why people love Animal Crossing. For real, that game got me through the pandemic (not that it's over, hello fellow maskers!).

It's also future-proofing. Something I find really neat about this project is that I can fully navigate and enjoy my site without even being online. The whole thing exists in a single folder on my hard drive. It's easy to back up.

I've written the pages so that no domain name is hard-coded in anywhere. All the links within the site are relative, as in, they link directly to each other. If I click on "home", it tells the browser, "go back to index.html in the main folder," rather than telling it, "go back to hollie.eilloh.net" (for which it would have to access the internet).

This means that I can drop the index.html from my site folder (the home page) into any browser, and the whole site is visible and functional, every link will work (specifically, every link within the website will work - links that go offsite, to other websites, would not work in that scenario because that would require an internet connection). Moving to a new domain? Every link will work. Moving to a new web host? Every link will work.

I love the idea of filling my site up with my own writing and photos and then being able to make a duplicate of that folder and send it to any of my loved ones who want it, who can then have their own copy and be able to browse the entire thing at their leisure, if something ever happens to me. More accurately, WHEN something happens to me, since we don't live forever. If my site is hosted online with some company, it will disappear when someone stops paying the bills. But if it's all just a folder of files, it can exist for my loved ones, forever, for free, and it doesn't even have to be online to do so.

Okay enough of that stuff, on to Saturday and Sunday

Well, today, I've been eating lentil soup and writing this, and reading the news about the protests in LA. The courage of the folks standing up to ICE is just incredible.

When I'm done here, I gotta finish an outline for school. Thank the gods for Zotero.

Yesterday was fun

We went downtown to the Saturday Market, and walked around in the sun. It was so bright, and for awhile I wasn't sure my system could take the heat, but then things settled down and I felt kinda strong, which is very unusual and very wonderful.

At the cafe I painted my drink while everyone talked. A woman walked by, stopped at us, and said, "Happy Pride Month!" Awwww! :) Then she said she was around in the 60's, "...and I thought Nixon was bad, and NOW WE HAVE THIS! Anyway, don't let the bastards grind you down," and before I could ask her if she was also a fan of The Handmaid's Tale, she had walked away. We dug her.

And then I gave my sketchbook to my son and his boyfriend so they could add additional arty content.

Not my drink, but has my name on it because I made the order. My whole life people have written "Holly", as I rarely correct anyone unless it's some kind of paperwork where it's important. As a kid, no one spelled it right, and if I corrected them they'd wearily say, "Why don't you just spell it with a y?"

Well, because it's not like Christmas holly (next question I get is, "Were you born in December?"), it's because my great-grandmother's last name was Holland, and her friends called her Hollie. I love that my name comes from a nickname given to a wonderful person by her friends, but I've never minded being called Holly. It's like my alternate secret name. I'm here, but not here!

After coffee we walked to J. Michaels, my tied-with-Tsunami-as-my-favorite bookstore, and holy cats there is now an illustrated version of The Hidden Life of Trees, one of my favorite books.

I also collect bookmarks, so I got a couple pretty ones!