2023-Sep-23

Welcome

New blog!

New blog

This time it's going to be simple and still not discouraging to update content. I put the code with some demo content on my github repo.

A shortened version of the readme.md:

write HTML yourself
use some php helper functions
made for simple shared hosts: no build, no deploy, just push changed files via FTP
zero JS, zero dependencies; language and theme handling only via browser preferences

License

The blog "software" is MIT, the example content text is CC-0, the example media for the blogs, including the teaser images, are also CC-0. This refers to the content you can find in the github repo. Actual, future content is mine.

The license for the font can be found as PDF in the fonts-directory, or read online at the website of the Braille Institute.

Develop / write

It was a bit challenging to have demo content in the repo which wouldn't appear on my actual website, and vice versa have actual content on my website which is not supposed to appear in the github repo.

That means, when you download the repo, as first step strip the _demo-part from the directory post_demo, as well as from the two files php/_metadata_demo.php and feed_demo.xml.

Then start a local server with php -S localhost:3000, don't forget to push files to your server. There is no hot reloading, so reload in browser when you changed something. I said it's a simple setup, right? :P

After writing a post, check for layout breaks on long descriptions etc., it's not fool-proof. The exact procedure for writing a new post is in more detail in the readme, but basically look into the post-directory, in the php/_metadata.php-file and the feed.xml-file. In other words, all the ones where you had to strip the _demo-part from the name. Copy paste, check the contents, change what looks like needs to be changed.

Teaser image

file name is the post name and .webp extension
304 x 112 px
the center will be occupied by text

Personal data

To make your blog copy truly yours, change all the traces of my personal data:

in index.php change email and social media links
in header.php change blog name
in _misc.php -> html_head() change <title> tag
in feed.xml, change everything so it fits your blog and points to your URLs
change SVG for the header

Multi-language setup

In php/_misc.php adapt the lang() function: Change the array to contain the languages you want to support. If it is just english, you can let the function simply return 'en'. There is a commented line for this already, just comment out the other return instead.

Change/remove/add translations inside the posts-directory and name them according to the scheme.

Note: The language-codes must be official, because the lang()-function compares the available ones with the one the browser returns, so it has to match to work. We also care just for the first two letters, so if the full code is either pt-BR or pt-PT, just use pt.

Theming

If you plan to do substantial changes, know your markup and CSS :) But maybe you just want to change some colors around, then you find in the top part of the style.css a lot of color-related variables. A basic knowledge about how colors and variables in CSS work is probably helpful. But if you mess up stuff, head to the github repo's CSS file and copy the sections you want to recover.