I haven't done anything for months on the website but actually I did. When Wordpress announced that they were going all in on AI sloppification, I decided then and there to transition to a static web design. I told them that too, in their community survey.

Oh boy. That meant dragging out my old HTML and JavaScript website and rejigging it, except that it wasn't really suitable for the purpose. I wanted to, as much as possible, retain the core structure of the website but without using Wordpress. Many of the elements were there but it needed a thorough refresh, plus I wanted to try out some new ideas.

Firstly, I decided to get rid of the JavaScript. I could do away with the banner image rotation easily enough. I did try to keep the news ticker but in taking the web site out of quirks mode it no longer worked, so that went in the bin as well. Then there were the buttons. I've always used .gif buttons (since the 1990's) for navigation but I'd already had a play with CSS buttons in my other coding exercises and laboriously redesigning new graphics seemed like a chore - it always was a chore. Plus I was trying to get rid of JavaScript.

So I sat down with W3Schools dot com and figured out how to add the CSS stuff I wanted. I stripped the random styles out of the HTML and moved all of them to the external style sheet document. On the way I added in automatic light/dark themes and rounded corners for the images on the site. No more messing around in GIMP adding rounded corner effects. All I do in GIMP now is crop and size.

I figured out a sort of a way to recreate Wordpress' blog structure, which is a series of index pages that lead to individual blog entries. I decided on a regular naming scheme for my blog pages. They follow the pattern byymmddee.html, with ee being the index number to distinguish between entries written on the same day (the initial 'b' stands for blog BTW). I also made a standard blog index page that I can add blog entry links to. It works but it does take a bit of fiddling to maintain and update links as I write new blog entries or add index pages.

The last addition I made was to add dates to the entry links on the index pages. That way when you go to the index page you can see when each blog entry was written and that helps because reasons. I've only done it for the last of the blog indices so far.

Now, I know there are lots of online fonts to choose from and it's fashionable to use G**gle fonts but that would mean tying the website design to G**gle and nope, I think the website is fine with Tahoma, Verdana and Arial. Maybe not super pretty but it works.

I also made sure the website works with keyboard navigation and included tab stops and alt text and whatnot. Since there are blind people in the world it makes sense, don't you think?

Thoughts

As I write this, I haven't taken the old site down to replace it with this one. I think I am pretty happy with the results though. It's easy enough to add a page or update an index even if I am using plain old HTML. Maybe it's time to push this site to production, as I believe some people like to say.

And once again I'm telling fibs because the site is now live. I had a bit of a quiet afternoon and decided to vandalise the existing site. I logged in and moved all the existing files into a new folder and uploaded the new content. There was a bit of trouble because the site cache was still serving the old pages but after I cleared the cache everything seemed fine.