manymanymany varia websites

When considering how to design a website for varia, our¹ mutual but implicit understanding was not to just make a site. But rather that there was a potential for the process of site-making to become a process of exploring what a website can be. Exploring how one could do web publishing in a self-hosted², minimal³, portable⁴, documented⁵, FLOSS⁶ and playfull⁷ way. In a way that connects to the multiplicity of practices that varia consists of. This text is the beginning of an attempt to make explicit and put to words some of the ideas and questions that drove this process. In the spirit of release early, release often we will publish a series of texts as we develop this site. Hopefully this can trigger questions on web design in the conceptual sense, not as a practice only involved with visual language, but as a practice considering on-line publishing ecosystems. One of the fundamental choices we made early on was to use a static site generator as our publishing tool, so we'll start by introducing the concepts of both 'static site' and 'generator'.

The varia website unfolding over time.

Static site

Varia.zone is a static website. A static website is a 'traditional' website where all the content consists of HTML documents on the server's hard disk. In our case these are generated through Pelican⁸, which is a collection of Python⁹ scripts and plugins¹⁰ to turn unstyled plain text into HTML pages.

Schematic overview of the main differences between a static and a dynamic website.

This way of working can be understood to be different to 'more modern' websites. These modern methods use server side programming languages that generate the website on the fly by querying a database. This means that every time someone visits the site, it gets generated on demand.

A static website instead gets generated once and exists as a set of documents. They are always there, not only when a visitor visits the page. Like the tree in the forest that also falls when nobody is there to hear it. Static websites are thus based on file storage whereas dynamic websites depend on recurrent computation. A website based on storage has some advantages for performance, security, portability and reproducibility that we will address in detail later in the series.

The static website is supportive to another idea we would like to push for: independent, self-hosted services. Since a static website requires less resources, one can do with a not-so-powerful, energy efficient server to host them. This opens up the possibility to (economically) serve the site directly from our space, which we currently do.

The varia server in the space, where various self-hosted services are installed.

In general hosting a server from one's own space introduces some security concerns. These are however partly mitigated by a static site, because it doesn't use server side languages. That also means the web server doesn't become a liability in terms of exploitable plug-ins or databases like in popular systems such as Wordpress. Once it has been generated, it is very much a case of set and forget.

In essence the minimal file-based website is contrary to a cloud mentality, where the material circumstances of the hardware and hosting location are made irrelevant (for the cloud/vps customer) meaning that any 'service' can be 'deployed', 'scaled' 'migrated' etc. Our approach instead informs what can be hosted based on the material circumstances of the server. The choice to self-host this website is a start for us to think about what it means to base web design decisions on a specific situation in terms of hardware and hosting location.

Generator

The static HTML documents that together make the varia website are not manually written in the html language, but are generated out of a set 'plain text'¹¹ documents. This generating aspect allows for multiple ways to engage with the texts and images that we publish. It is a promising way to think about possible transformations of plain text into not just web pages but different media altogether.

One of the needs for transformability comes from the fact that our website exists in a context where usage of the web has atrophied to the point where one is required to publish on or via social media in order to reach an audience at all. However, politically we are not interested in dedicated profiles on social media platforms for our organization. This is a clear decision driven by a strong desire to self-host and own our content, yet allowing to let that content be referred to comfortably within social media as well. The technique of the generator allows us to do this¹².

Working with generative processes also triggers our interest and enthusiasm for exploring other publishing tools. One can imagine a single text or article morphing into widely different media such as calendar entries, RSS feeds, email newsletters, posters, etc. Each of these introducing their own potentials for playful aesthetics, reading experiences and publics. This is on the one hand interesting as a form of automation that reduces (or better: re-uses) work, but more importantly as a process which necessarily will introduce new 'forms' and aesthetics.

This article in its plain text 'view', showing the markdown mark-up language.

At the center this processes relies heavily on the habit of writing in markdown, a mark-up language that allows one to add styling information to plain text, so that it can be read by both people and a variety of tools. The markdown files can be archived using versioning tools¹³ or easily converted into different formats using generators. The content of the website, in its 'raw' form, can therefore be read by many other softwares across (historical) operating systems or included in other workflows, and thus stay open for potential reuse and long-term re-accesibility. Using this process makes it possible for our source files to remain simple, fluid and archivable.

Concluding

Revisiting static sites and taking all these small steps feels like going back in time. However, revisiting web-development basics in this sense becomes a vehicle for understanding the web of these days. To get a sense of the compound choices that have sedimented over time into 'web design' practices and that remain opaque when using ready made frameworks. Creating an on-line publishing work flow from ground up instead allows one to explore the potentials and challenge the conventions of what a website should be.

To unpack the website ...

This folder of Pelican scripts, markdown documents, images, template and css files ...

varia.website.git
├── content/
|   └── post1.en.md
|   └── post1.nl.md
├── LICENSE
├── Makefile
├── output
├── pelicanconf.py
├── pelican-plugins
├── plugins-custom
├── publishconf.py
├── README.md
└── themes

... generates the following output folder ...

output/
├── author/
|   └── varia.html
├── categories.html
├── category/
|   └── event.html
├── en/
|   └── feeds/
|   |   └── all-en.rss.xml
│   ├── post1.en.html
│   ├── post2.en.html
|   └── post3.en.html
├── events.ics
├── feeds/
|   └── all.rss.xml
├── images/
├── index.html
├── pages/
│   ├── about.html
|   └── stream.html
├── post1.nl.html
├── post2.nl.html
├── post3.nl.html
└── theme/