brain trust: talk to me about hosted content?

[cellio]

I've written lots of stuff in a variety of places online -- (LJ to) Dreamwidth and Medium and SE and one-offs in handwritten HTML and (heaven help us) Twitter and probably some others. Some of it was transient, but some of it is stuff I'd like to keep available and together.

I have a domain and the hosting company offers what I gather are standard tools, of which Wordpress is the one that keeps coming up in searches about setting up simple web sites.

My domain isn't empty, but there's not a lot there. I have things with published URLs that need to not get disrupted, but I'd otherwise like to have a web site with some of the basics ("about" page, contact form) and, mainly, this collection of things I've written. I'm going to have to curate the things I've written anyway (I kind of gave up on the idea of bulk-importing 20 years' worth of Livejournal/Dreamwidth), so I don't mind if I have to post things one at a time. I'm going to be rereading them one at a time to decide their fates, after all.

I'd like it if whatever receives my words of (cough) wisdom spoke both HTML and Markdown. I will, of course, want to be able to tag those posts.

I need it to have a time-based archive (by month or whatever). I'd like tags to work as tags and not just visual labels -- that is, you should be able to click on a tag to see other things with that tag. I think all this is "blog 101" and tools generally do that stuff.

I need to be able to easily back up the content.

I don't know what other questions I should be asking myself.

I've read some of the "getting started with Wordpress" stuff on their site, but before I go much farther: will that meet my needs? (I can't tell about input formats and backups, in particular.) What else should I be looking at? What decisions should I be making before I install anything? What's the easiest path that would probably work for my (I think) modest needs?

Update: Thank you to the several people who pointed out that what I need (and the name for it) is static site generator. Further pointers still welcome.

Comments

[siderea]

I'd like to add a caution to what everyone else is saying about "Static Site Generators". When I went browsing SSGs, I discovered a whole lot of them are distressingly dynamic: they're dynamic on the client end, with heavy JS, particularly JS-based Responsive Design (tm) frameworks*. I found it extremely hard to weed out all the ones that don't generate actual, you know, static sites.

Anyways, I got fed up and just used PHP includes to manage my site navigation and handcode my HTML pages in emacs like we were born to.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8

P.S. I feel I should also mention, SSGs are not generally meant for people in shared hosting environments, in that they typically require shell access, and sometimes (often?) require to set up that you have the authority to install programs on the server. Many companies offer SSH access for shared hosting customers on request; whether or not they will be willing to let you run arbitrary code on their server is another thing.

[cellio]

Love the song! So true.

Thanks for the heads-up about the loose definition of "static".

Can you say more about "used PHP includes to manage site navigation"? I've been editing HTML by hand in emacs since 1993; I don't mind doing that for my undemanding content here. I just don't want to have to wire up indexes and month-by-month archives and stuff by hand -- need automation there, which I assume any sane person going down the "edit the HTML yourself" path would need and so this should be a solved problem somehow.

I have shell access on my shared hosting server, but don't know what I can run there. On the other hand, I could generate content on my desktop machine and then FTP it there, which lets me test it out locally before deploying. What things about that might make me sad?

[siderea]

On the other hand, I could generate content on my desktop machine and then FTP it there, which lets me test it out locally before deploying.

I was just coming back to say that, yes; or better, use rsync (encrypted, and, well, you want to take down retired/moved pages on site publish, so not sure if FTP will do that right for you).

What things about that might make me sad?

Doing it that was has the apparently nice feature of your local version is a draft, and the version you send to the webserver is the live, but note this is a staging/prod system with the same potential problems:

• Out of syncness between what you're editing and what's on the server.

• Things working differently on the two different OSes involved. WARNING: case sensitivity in file names on Macs works differently than on Linux, which has bit me and others who have done staging/prod of HTML. (I don't remember the deets.)

[siderea]

Can you say more about "used PHP includes to manage site navigation"?

My architecture:

Every page is named "index.php". It resides in a directory that gives it its identity, e.g. "/about/index.php".

The ".php" suffix makes Apache run it through PHP before serving it. The "index" means it's the default page for its directory, so "/about/index.php" is what serves as "https://mydomain.tld/about/".

Every page opens with:

<?php
include '../inc_header.php';
?>
<body>

<div id="nav">
<?php 
include '../inc_nav.php';
?>
</div>


<div id="maincontent">

inc_header.php is just my invariant HTML header.

inc_nav.php has the logic for the navigation, which is hardcoded:

<?php
    $currentpage = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
    $currentpage = explode('/', $currentpage);
    $temp='';
    foreach ($currentpage as $dir) {
        if (preg_match('/\.php/', $dir)) {
            next;
        } else {
            $temp=$temp . $dir  . '/';
        }
    } 
    $currentpage = $temp;
    # print($temp);
    
?>

[a bunch of attractive HTML goes here]

<p id="nav">
		<a href="/" <?=($currentpage == '/')?'class="currentpage"':''?>>Home</a> 
	| 	<a href="/contact" <?=($currentpage == '/contact/')?'class="currentpage"':''?>>Contact</a> 
	|	<a href="/about" <?=($currentpage == '/about/')?'class="currentpage"':''?>>About</a> 
	|	<a href="/location" <?=($currentpage == '/location/')?'class="currentpage"':''?>>Location</a> 
	</p>

Everything else is just HTML.

Obviously, this isn't even dynamic enough to figure out about new pages, itself; I have to add each new page manually (if I were to add one). I could make it "smarter" and have it interogate the OS, but this quickly comes back to the fundamental problem SSGs exist to solve: where do you park, and how do you manage, page meta-data, like "what is this page called by the humans, as opposed to the OS" and "does it have a date associated with it" and "how shall it be indexed/cross-referenced".

[cellio]

Thank you very much!