I’m just about almost done rewriting the CSS of my main blog just the way I like it. Bulma was a good CSS framework. Fun times…

The “CSS router” has always been quite the clever trick for navigating sufficiently small sites. This site uses it to scroll switch pages, and portable.fyi gets clever with visibility :target switching. Do it just right and no one notices unless they “inspect the elements”.

It’s always humbling when I get around to reading a web related spec. HTML and CSS have a lot of functionality. JavaScript’s not bad (it’s the easiest part of web development) but gives you just enough rope to do super silly things like reinventing all built in browser functions.

The Android and WordPress ecosystems give off similar superstitious vibes. Remember when everyone was obsessed with registry cleaners and system optimizers?

White spaces in HTML trick many into writing complex CSS — web development is trollish that way. Firefox’s developer tools show generated white spaces! Hopefully your abstraction is munging HTML faithfully. It’s easy to fight white spaces without realising it. That generally leads to using unsuitable display types and other shenanigans.

Looks like it’s time to rewrite the CSS of my main website for fast iteration and decoupling Hugo from PHP. I’ll still allow the generated files to move passively through the OPcache in case there’s a need for dynamicity. Hugo has pretty much deprecated all of my PHP hacks.

What’s funny about the NixOS/GNU Guix design is that it tricks developers into writing their own system packages. That would never happen on other Linux distributions. I’m slowly favoring Guix though, since the new nix flake interface couples too tightly with git.

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