So while everyone is sort of in the process of rediscovering the way this World Wide Web works before we were all on the big platforms hating everything, I want to share how I make my own websites because I use a really cool tool called a static site generator that requires a bit more effort on my part, but gives me complete control over everything and lets me automate away some of the tedium of running a static site (I'll explain what that is in the next section).
It lets me focus on my content, only having to add the bare minimum of JavaScript and CSS that I need to make things interactive and look pretty. It's the closest I've felt to my high school days of slapping stuff on Geocities with nothing more than notepad and the copious amount of time an introverted high school nerd has. While there is some code involved, I don't think there's so much that it requires a professional-level dev like me to figure out, and a lot of work has already been done for you.
It's not the only way to make a website or even really the most popular way these days (I'm going to talk about that too), but I think it's a very accessible way that lets you have full control and seems to be generally unknown outside a circle of programmer weirdoes like me, so I am writing up this series of posts talking about it.
And just to reassure you that you can make a nice, modern site that can have a lot of content I suggest you take a look at my sites for my upcoming text adventure Quoll and The Fantabulous Season of '40, a TTRPG campaign I mean to run some day. I'll keep pulling examples from these as I explain. Any way, let's get started by talking about what a static (web)site and static site generator are, starting by comparing them to "dynamic" web applications (like Cohost!) that tend to be more common online. This is mostly going to be a bunch of introductory fluff that I will expand on with some practical details in future posts, so feel free to skip over stuff you're already familiar with.
