Teach

Simple steps and useful examples.

This is the method of teaching I like for learning.

It's also why I have been so excited to see each day a new post by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer; “Learning web development"

https://2ality.com/2025/08/learning-web-dev-toc.html

Thank you Dr. Axel!

My Reasons

  1. I like the writing style
  2. Working examples
  3. A topic I did a lot of work in, and still some
  4. Shows me what I lost years ago, learning all those fancy web frameworks

Particularly #4 brings me back to what I have been wanting lately, a simple, easy to use and maintain web enabled system using the native tools we have: html, css and javascript built-ins.

I used to write simple web pages, linking them together to make up a story, and using all those funny icons from the 1990's in the 1990's. Picture albums and books with audio links for reading to children. Even GIF's of hand drawn icons. :{0

Dynamic database driven web sites were some of the things I did at work, and it also creeped into my home projects. Of course I could not pay for the fancy tools like work had, but capable open source alternatives rolled out at an impressive pace.

When JQuery [1] came out it was great, then Angularjs [2], and finally porting to Angular [3]; I felt the web to database scenario was getting way too complex and it burned me out of webdev. I kept thinking "There must be a better way."

Better Way

Then I tried static site builders such as Hugo [4] and Pelican [5].

Pros

  1. Simple text files (markdown)
  2. Automatic menu structure
  3. Search
  4. RSS [6] sharing

Cons

  1. Hate the build process (waiting...)
  2. Separate Search build process (more waiting...)
  3. Complex
  4. Rely on projects not standards

Suddenly the urge is with me to update my decades old project in a simpler very open source design and implementation. This may or may not happen, but it should be fun to explore once again with a fresh mind, and newer standards and few, if any, projects.

What I Want to Build

Web based system for

  1. text
  2. menu
  3. search
  4. RSS [6] sharing

contained in simple, 100% source code.

Less code is better.

Reference

  1. https://jquery.com/
  2. https://angularjs.org/
  3. https://angular.io/start
  4. https://gohugo.io/
  5. https://getpelican.com/
  6. https://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification

-- Don Cohoon

PS: If this sounds like the web's oldest app (e-mail), you are right!

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