The Simple Pleasure of Hand-Writing Web Pages

16 Nov 2024, 12:32 a.m.

I get a bit pensive when the colder months roll around. This is not always pleasant, and I generally manage my mind by beating the worst of my ruminations into the vague shape of a story and making it someone else’s problem. It’s been a little while since I’ve had a creative outlet, though. Life and parenthood and ill health have gotten in the way. I’ve really missed writing fiction but I just cannot be bothered to go through the grind of submitting my work to various publications in the vague hope that someone would accidentally publish me. It’s happened once or twice before but it takes so much admin. So, a month or two ago I decided I needed to build myself a new site to host some of my fiction.

Obviously, this meant spending a decent chunk of my dwindling free time procrasti-planning the whole operation. I spent far too long trying to decide whether I’d:

Use a pre-built CMS
Build a CMS (like I did with this site)
Use a static site generator
Build a static site generator

Overall, I wanted to keep it light and simple. I decided that if I didn’t need the feature set of a CMS, there wasn’t much point in using one (taking no small amount of inspiration from the small web and similar ideas). So that’s option one and two off the list.

The last option seemed like the one with the best balance of practicality and pointlessly reinventing the wheel for my temperament, so I messed around with that for a bit. Eventually, though, I just really wanted to get something out there and learning Go to make an SSG felt like wasting time (I was absolutely wasting time if I’m honest with myself. The working title for the SSG was ‘poogo’, if you’re curious. Like Hugo, but shit). So I rolled my sleeves up and just typed the bloody HTML by myself.

I have to tell you, I had a lovely time.

And yeah, I know, we don’t need to do that anymore and there are better ways now. But there’s something kinda meditative about closing tags and fiddling with CSS. The balance of effort to results makes me feel like I’ve done a fair amount of work, makes the site feel like a part of the creative endeavour rather than simply a delivery mechanism for the things I pull out of the currents and eddies of my mind in the silly hours before and after sleep.

I have the basics there. Still need to polish some stuff, add a background image to the header, few other tweaks here and there, but generally I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Most crucially, having somewhere to put my stories actually has me writing fiction again. It’s great to revisit some old stuff and give it a little tweak, and it’s awesome to feel new stories drip from my fingertips almost faster than the keyboard can catch them.

Now, am I certain that I’ll always want to hand-write every page? Absolutely not. I’m already tentatively working on some shell scripts to automate the process later down the line (with special emphasis on the RSS XML file, because I kept ballsing that up and I’d like to never do it again), and I anticipate that I’ll have things a lot more hands-off within a few months.

I chose to deploy the site on a VPS from OpenBSD Amsterdam (who I’d strongly recommend. Onboarding was quick and easy and I’ve had no issues). It actually only uses programs from the OpenBSD base system to serve the site. I use git to ferry new and changed files to the server, but otherwise everything is pure Puffy. I’m using httpd as my web server and acme-client for certificates. I have a vague impression I should have used relayd in there somewhere but everything works so I’m not worrying about it right now. I think it’s kinda neat that all I had to do to get my site out there is pkg_add git and then edit a few config files and git clone. I still had to have a couple of goes at it before I got it right, mind. I’m nothing if not an enthusiastic amateur. My experience with deploying the site this blog post is hosted on to a Digital Ocean Ubuntu VPN was a bit more fiddly. Some of that is unquestionably because this site is a full stack job whereas the new one is just static. I’ll have to shove something more complicated onto an OpenBSD box to really get a fair comparison. I’m sure I’ll think of some suitable nonsense.

But I digress.

It’ll take me a little bit to sort through old stories and choose which ones will work with the site, so it’s a little empty, but for now here it is. I’m Antony Frost in horror circles. I find it makes it easier to keep things straight in my head if I use a pseudonym rather than the name I use here (which is coincidentally the same as my name offline). It’s been a minute since I’ve put anything out there, and if I’m known at all under that name it’ll be for interviews with other authors more than my own work.

And just to be extra clear: I write dark fiction. Horror and horror-adjacent. Reader beware and all that. Still, I’d love it if folks subscribe to the RSS feed so I can spread my nightmares around a bit.

The site has a pretty obvious theme. I’m setting all the stories in the same fictional town. Saves a bit of world-building time and avoids me getting real-life details wrong, while also letting me self-indulgently engage in mythos-building. Think of me like a crazy-in-a-different-way Lovecraft with a more modern writing style/perspective on life and far less popularity.