I hadn't changed the layout of my homepage since the relaunch in
2010. A lot happened in the web area. Frameworks like Bootstrap or Material Design Lite appeared and
I've stumbled over a tool called JBake
that generates static HTML sites. A few days before I've got time to
put all together for a new homepage I've read an interesting article
about The
Website Obesity Crisis.
In The
Website Obesity Crisis the author notices how web sites grow
larger and larger (you have to download several MB to read an
article) and that companies like Google and Facebook create
proprietary frameworks instead of just reducing the bloat of the
sites.
After reading it I've measured the size of my own page: 3,3 KB for
index.html. I've seen websites having a larger number before the MB.
Nevertheless I've started looking at Bootstrap and Material Design Lite. Both had
some nice menus I've wanted for my own site. After some inspecting
and fiddling with the code I've found out that both sites add extra
CSS to their framework. So to get a decent menu you do not only have
to add several KB of CSS framework but also several KB of Javascript
and THEN add more extra CSS than my whole site had at this point of
time. That was the point where I've stopped it and looked closer at
the CSS I've already had.
Most of the the changes were minimal. I could reuse a lot. Well,
until I've decided to add a Sticky Footer. To
use it I had to adjust the HTML tags in my site. Fortunately my
homepage generator used a template and all changes were in the
template. The real pain of using the Sticky Footer was
that I've lost all padding and margin. I could delete the zeroing of
the padding but the margin has to be zero for each element or the Sticky Footer won't
work. That affects a lot of elements like p,ol,ul,pre. Fortunately
you can using padding there. Just user p+p or pre+pre to set the
padding of top or bottom to zero.
As you may have noticed in the previous paragraph, I haven't used JBake. Also they advertise to use raw
HTML as input the program doesn't process complete HTML files. Each
file needs a header with Java properties. After that is the document
content you would place in the body tags but without the body tags
and event without the header tag. So no editing with Seamonkey or
other such tools. Using a WYSIWG editor was the reason to write my
own generator in the first place. So I've stuck with it.
Btw. you see here no popup message saying the site is storing
cookies. That is because this site is using no cookies. And no
tracking pixels or other crap like this. Because of that I haven't
included a discussion board like DISQUS.
Adding one would bring such things to my page and with them all the
legal implication.