2025/Düsseldorf/personalcms

Personal website management was a discussion session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2025.

Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/personalcms

Participants

Notes

Joschi:

I like using an ASCIIdoc workflow because Markdown doesn't have the features I want.
Biggest challenge: maintaining systems, plugins, libraries
really picky about the markup that is created. I want it lean, accessible. I want control of the markup, and I don't trust any system that claims to be accessible.
I only work on it at IndieWebCamps, like twice a year

Daniel:

can have hosting challenges
not a fan of a database
like flat files like what Kirby does
at one point I decided to not use a database

Challenges with upgrading Kirby to keep up with PHP versions, then can have breaking changes

Tantek:

I still have to depend on PHP 7.x, would like to fix problems in my PHP to work on PHP 8.

Christian:

For the last upgrade I did to an old PHP code, I was consulting ChatGPT and it worked

Joschi:

lowest level is the content
being able to just write the content in a way you can read it
started with Markdown but switched to ASCIIdoc
first layer on top would be a file system on top to organize your content (text files)
next layer is to put a webserver to serve the files
next layer is to transform it to HTML, then add CSS to make it pretty, then add interactivity
longevity, not relying on databases. databases breaks longevity. introduces technology to your content that makes your content dependent on technology. if the technology becomes outdated, then it breaks your content.

Gunnar showing how he does it by sharing his screen:

on gunnarbittersmann.de he writes plain HTML, no CMS at all
on bittermann.de/startrek he uses JSON+Ld files as data sources: https://bittersmann.de/startrek/series/snw.jsonld
The JSON+Ld files are public so that anyone can do what they wnat with it.
The then built a frontend via a PHP layer
Schepp rembers a project where JSON was delivered with HTML mime type and had a script tag in the JOSN structure that gets picked up by the browser's parser and makes it transform it into a full HTML page
Tantek never had an attempt at storing his content in JSON as he uses to forget the syntax and when he is revisiting JSON he has a hard time decoding it
Someone points at the possibility of using XML instead of JSON. Tantek finds this to be even more complicated.
Gunnar also leaves the metadata in his rendered output
Joschi prefers markdown or Asciidocs more as ** the way you store the data is closer to the way you present the data

Tantek is presenting his way of doing things, sharing the screen:

in his old blog he did (static) flat files, one per month, and links would point to those files with anchor links
He added a lot of structure to it to be able to very granularly link to content inside it
He also played with swapping out the stylesheet for a new one for each one of the flat files (or even new edits of it), while keeping the HTML structure consistent - basically a CSS Zen Garden approach
Tantek finds static files to be a good start and also documenting the way one takes over the course of time
For his current blog, Tantek stores data in HTML, enriched with microformats, e.g. https://tantek.com/2025/1.html
For his notes, though, he just embeds them as a kind of plaint text markdown/YAML-esk snippet inside that HTML. He has a transformation system, that picks them up and converts them based on certain conventions into something richer based on class names.
The reason for going for such a mix is that he didn't want to have to write everything down in HTML
Gunnar see a lot of resemblance with markdown, to which Tantek agrees, but his "dialect" is without markdown's bad parts (from his personal view)
As technology he uses self-rolled PHP but that keeps him from just editing and publishing from his smartphone

Summary of this session is that HTML is a great format for longevity and it's also a very versatile data source format.

<pre style="white-space:pre-wrap; font-family:inherit">
Here is a plain text note.

Here is a really long line.... Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....Here is a really long line....

Line breaks will work.

    So will leading spaces! Or multiple spaces: "        "

</ pre>

Schepp adds that the rather new Custom Highlight API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CSS_Custom_Highlight_API) could also be used to prettify such <pre> wrapped code.

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Participants

Notes

See Also