WordPress rants are a joy to read, but where’s the simpler, safer replacement? Never forget that software is highly corporatized and mostly crafted for corporations, not humans. WordPress sits among the few that mere mortals can work with and understand. The complete revival of static sites might save us, maybe.

Take the innocent PHP web server cli.

php -S 127.0.0.1:8080

Best not to use PHP’s web server cli (even for PHP) because routes with a dot (.) are assumed to be static files. Use a real web server or superior cli web servers with minor gotchas.

python -m http.server --bind 127.0.0.1 8080
busybox httpd -f -p 127.0.0.1:8080
ruby -run -e httpd . -p 8080

I might try out the Fresh framework from deno to see if the hype is true hype.

Reading about the Fresh framework lead me to an article about islands architecture and progressive hydration. “Island based client hydration” looks like a type of progressive enhancement.

Wonder how an adjustment to that theory pans out? Might be enough of a golden hammer for most use cases but imo, scaling/speed issues are more fundamental/situational. You could swap between or hybridize client/server all you want and still mess up.

Hugo has template performance metrics with the --templateMetrics flag. Here’s a snippet of the metrics for this site.

$ hugo --templateMetrics

Start building sites … 
hugo v0.101.0+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown

Template Metrics:

 cumulative       average       maximum         
   duration      duration      duration  count  template
 ----------      --------      --------  -----  --------
7.278303484s   49.177726ms  237.175705ms    148  partials/generate-feeds.html
7.22797312s   112.93708ms  246.988674ms     64  _default/single.html
6.982028147s   83.119382ms  245.262274ms     84  partials/navigator-right.html
6.683942678s   47.070018ms  237.223569ms    142  partials/web-ring.html
1.685089741s    5.561352ms   28.254398ms    303  _default/summary.html

A nice thing about following lots of diverse technical feeds is that you’ll always kinda know what’s next. The “next” darling in the realm of front end web development seems to be Next.js? Meanwhile, I’m still messing around with WordPress installs.

Parsing RSS feeds is always a pain. Don’t parse feeds inside the template engine kids :-)

The dictionary and thesaurus are among my most used tools. Easy to install and use offline on any device — no search engine required. I just also realized that my most used offline tools are not in my blog post about programming without the Internet..

Why blog? One key reason is for framing offline and organic discussions — they’re the best. Online discussions tend to devolve into “peanut gallery” takes for any range of topics. You can’t know it all, but being in the gallery is fun?

It’s painful to realize that a program’s state is name spaced wrongly/scattered. You’ve then got to either accept the complexity or rewrite select portions + migrate to a more correct data hierarchy. Databases exist to make that easier.

Though, imo the simplest form of system administration is when you only have to backup/copy state directories from one computer to the next.