I don’t blame Cathode Ray Dude at all, really.

From Cathode Ray Dude...

i should be able to host my own blog where i can write posts in a WYSIWYG editor, not in goddamn markdown, and where i can drag images into the editor to upload and embed them. it’s pathetic that what we could do with frontpage in 1998 is no longer possible with any available tooling, and it’s because the only two parties that exist in the website creation space at this point are

1. hypercorporation offering you a Web App designed to generate one of 8 possible sites, all based on massive and hideous templates intended to make your local plumbing company look like a fortune 500 with tons of parallax-effect static images and pull quotes and shit like that. each page load is 8-12 megs and takes over 40 seconds on gigabit internet and an i9
2. Computer People who say “just use a static site generator. all you have to do is SSH into your server (you DO carry the same laptop with you everywhere, right?) and type up everything in markdown, then run a command to generate your site, then go load the site in a browser and drill down to the page you just created in order to find out what it looks like, then repeat that every single time you make a change. what do you mean you want to embed images? huh. sounds weird. well if you really want that, it’s easy: simply create thumbnails by hand in photoshop, give every image a unique filename by hand, manually upload them to your server, then write a chunk of line noise like:

   (images/j2me_game_1_1.png)!(images/thumbs/j2me_game_1_1.png)[screenshot of j2me game 1]

   “simply do this 24 times if you want 24 images. if you make a typo, you’ll find out when the image doesn’t load!”

yes i know some ssg’s try to smooth over parts of this. i don’t care, it’s not enough, i fundamentally hate the way they work and it is a massive impedance to me getting anything done, no discussion, this is not up for debate. i just fucking want to see what i’m working on without a six step process, the way i could with frontpage or dreamweaver or microsoft expressions, twenty five fucking years ago.

I don’t blame this guy at all, despite being one of the “computer people”.

I had written a whole long-ass rant about how tools for making websites are not particularly accessible to non-developers, but Smudge ate it.

Also, I think I said everything that needed to be said in the summary.

• Jekyll is a pain in the ass, and ordinary people shouldn’t have to “blog like a hacker”.
• Astro and Eleventy require dealing with Node.js, npm, and JavaScript. That’s also a non-starter for ordinary people.
• Let’s not even get started on my approach. Ordinary people aren’t going to fuck around with makefiles, let alone write their own shell scripts.

I don’t have any good answers beyond recommending omg.lol if you want to throw together a personal website. Maybe try lmno.lol/ or Dreamwidth if you want to start a blog.

Either that, or install SeaMonkey and use its Composer app. It’s based on Netscape Composer, and if you’re OK with HTML 4.0 it’s a decent WYSIWYG website building tool.