Design webpages to last

A while ago, I can’t remember when or how, I came across an article titled This Page is Designed to Last, by Jeff Huang, an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Brown University.

He talks about how websites eventually die of because the maintainer gets tired of migrating services (as the services shutdown), updating libraries, and technology stacks. So he proposes to use plain HTML and CSS.

I have been looking into some simple blogging tools like Bear Blog and Mataroa and more recently Pika.page. So I started thinking how one could write plain html and use some css to build a simple blog like these tools offer.

Observing how Jeff Huang have built his website I came up with a simple structure to build a blog. It is not easy but it is really simple, perhaps requires attention so errors are not made. Basically for each blog post you will need to create a page and edit another three files, the home page, the blog posts page and the RSS feed file.

I will try to put together until the end of this month a zip file with this sample structure and some example files as well as instructions to make changes and get a simple blog going. Stay tuned.