Fremantle
· websites · photos ·
Static, dynamic, by James G., 15 January 2025:
Last year, I spent a lot of time iterating on Publish, the publishing interface for my website. This interface is a static HTML page that generates a markdown file. This markdown file can then be published to my website. The Publish page is public, but you cannot publish a blog post unless you have access to my Git repository.
This paradigm works well with my static website. I have a user interface that lets me prepare a post for publishing, and a button I can click that takes me to GitHub where I can publish the page. Having posts in static files and version control is significant to me. Static files are easy for me to reason with. I can see my data without having to use a database.
With that said, I see opportunities to improve the Publish tool that can only be done with a dynamic page.
The main improvement I would like to make is to streamline image publishing.
I've mentioned it before, but the storage and display of images (and other files) are the main things that keep me from switching fully to a static site. I am slowly working on some ideas for making those better, but really I'm not sure it'll ever be fully solved. It's too annoying to have to manually create derivative versions of every file, and (unlike what is described in the above post) I'm not sure I want to add content images to a Git repository.
Being able to drag and drop photos onto a blog post while editing is convenient, but that's not necessarily the workflow I'm aiming for — I generally want to upload things to Commons if possible, and add as much metadata as I can. So there's a certain laboriousness to adding images anyway, and reducing the time at upload mightn't matter too much.