A simple protocol lets you make the contents of your #smallweb / #indieweb site more fully discoverable and explorable by interested users. This can also let site A see what resources site B offers.
I’ve been working on this in the spirit of the web’s simple, venerable, and immensely valuable View Source facility. View Source just lets you view a single HTML page; the web lacks a standard equivalent of a directory listing for a given route. This aims to fill that gap.
I made a short video walking through how I generate OpenGraph images for the pages on my blog using Origami.
This video is an experiment. It takes me ages to create polished documentation or videos — and that’s discouraged me from creating anything at all! I thought I’d try recording a video with only minimal rehearsal and no editing and see if this kind of thing can fill the gap until I can produce something better.
To demonstrate that Origami is a good language for building #smallweb / #indieweb blogs, I built a fun sample blog reenvisioning Henry David Thoreau has a modern influencer with a lifestyle blog about off-grid living.
Creating a site in Origami is completely different than creating a site in any other tool I know of.
Origami isn’t a blog engine or framework, just like Microsoft Excel isn’t an invoicing or expense reporting framework. Excel is a general tool that transforms and aggregates numbers and text in tables. Origami is a general tool that transforms and aggregates data and content in trees.
So this project isn’t configuring a blog tool — it’s defining what a blog is from scratch. The source is endlessly malleable, and you can readily change what gets produced to achieve a wide variety of results.
To build in Origami, think about the starting tree of content you’ll write or gather by hand, and the final tree of resources in your running site. Step by step, you transform the former into the latter.
For a blog you might start with, say, a markdown folder containing markdown posts, an images folder for photos, and an assets folder for stylesheets.
The final resource tree comprises the images and assets as is, plus generated pages for individual posts, list pages, and feeds.
To generate individual pages you can use a template language. Origami has a nice one built in; you can use others.
But the real magic is writing formulas to process a pile of content at once, like a pipeline that transforms markdown to HTML, calculates data, and sorts the posts to prepare them for rendering.
Or a compact definition of the entire public portion of the site:
This Origami program generates the full tree of the resources for your blog, which you can browse immediately. The Origami runtime only does the work to generate a page when you ask for it.
The same Origami program can also produce a complete build folder with all your site files. Deploy those on a static web server or have a service do a build whenever you update your project.
Each month this year I’m trying to post a sample website written in Origami, a declarative programming language at the level of #HTML and #CSS for defining websites. This month’s sample is Aventour Expeditions, a site for an outdoor travel company.
It’s easy to have Origami call other template languages, so for this sample I used the Handlebars template language to turn markup and data into HTML.
It took just a few lines of Origami code to define the structure of the site and indicate which Handlebars template should be used to create which pages. For this outdoor travel example, Origami makes it very, very easy to:
Create a web page for trek described in markup with front matter.
Create index pages showing cards for a set of treks.
Create a gallery page showing each image in a folder. Origami makes it very easy to pass a Handlebars gallery template the list of image file names, which the template can turn into img tags and links.
Origami also made it easy to cross-link the data for each trek with related treks. That allows the page for one trek to show cards links to related treks.
Aside: modern HTML and CSS are soooo much better than the past. I based the trekking site on a WordPress template whose design I liked but whose HTML/CSS was ridiculously complex and burdened with tons of JavaScript for trivial things.
Rewriting slashed the size of the pages. For the home page:
So a handler can load a .hbs file as a function that applies a Handlebars template, then apply that in the command line.
Origami can resolve pretty much anything — JSON/YAML files, files with front matter, entire folder trees, a ZIP file, whatever — to an object your Handlebars template can operate on.
You can even write a one-liner that fetches data from a server and applies a template to it.
Applying a Handlebars template to a file system folder lets you, e.g., generate an HTML index page with links to all the HTML pages in the folder.
If one Handlebars template references another template (a “partial”), Origami resolves that reference for you. If you reference bold, it will look for a template named bold.hbs and use that.
This lets you decompose templates for complex results without the usual overhead of manually loading those templates and passing them as Handlebars configuration.
Origami itself is a powerful template language, but you might prefer Handlebars or some other template language. You can use Origami to define the overall structure of your site, then use Handlebars/etc. to turn data from anything into HTML.
It was easy to rewrite the Origami “About Us” sample site using Handlebars.
Suppose you want a photo blog that’s not on Tumblr or Instagram. Maybe you don’t like being sold, or want to draw outside the lines, or want photos as part of your own site. What would a #smallweb alternative look like that let you post a photo and caption from your phone?
I made a proof-of-concept street art photo blog that supports this on-phone flow: 1) snap a photo and set a caption, 2) save the photo to Google Drive via Files, 3) trigger a rebuild via the browser, 4) see the new photo on your own site.
Google Drive is hardly #indieweb, but look beyond “corporate = bad” and consider the nature of the relationship. They provide a commodity service: you pay them, they store your files. Those files are a medium of exchange. If (when?) Google screws around, you can easily move the files to a different storage provider. Switching costs for hosted platforms like Tumblr or Instagram are far higher.
All storage services provide a proprietary API to enable unique features and faster service… but also to force you to write to that API and make your own code a switching cost. But most of what you want from storage is just an easy way to: 1) list directories, 2) read a whole file, and (maybe) 3) save a whole file.
This interface lets small storage drivers wrap the proprietary APIs; switching providers is just a matter of switching drivers.
The Origami language can use such a driver to read images out of Google Drive and create a static, deployable site. Origami templates also understand that interface, so you can make a template that directly maps a folder’s photos to HTML <img> tags with dates and captions. 🎉
One significant hurdle: obtaining a Google API credential file. OMG figuring out any kind of auth on Google, Azure, or AWS is like wandering through a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. It’s also theoretically possible to use Google Cloud Pub/Sub to automatically trigger a site rebuild whenever a photo is added to Google Drive, but dang that looks complicated. Maybe some other day.
Standards like Exif (for photo captions and dates) make amazing things possible. They’re there for everyone to use — if a corp isn’t trying to cage you in their silo.
iOS/macOS Photos lets you edit the caption and save it in the photo so this photo blog can extract it. ✅
Google Photos lets you enter a caption but AFAICT saves it in a proprietary database instead of the photo file. Shame on them. ❌
The code for this photo blog is small: HTML + CSS + about 40 lines of Origami code. That includes defining RSS and JSON feeds. 😃
If I ever needed to switch storage providers, I’d just have to update the 3 lines of code that authenticate with Google and get a reference to the Drive folder. Everything else would stay the same.
Abstracting away storage doesn’t just give you an interesting way to build a site, it also opens up general-purpose terminal access so you can:
Extract the caption from a specific photo on Google Drive
Extract a specific file from Google Drive
Extract the dates from all the photos
Copy all the files from Google Drive to the local machine
Design notes:
It was fun to play with #CSS blur, text-shadow, and -webkit-text-stroke for a graffiti heading that’s just plain text! May also be the first time I’ve ever used magenta.
I was able to auto-size the header width to be roughly as wide as the photos by playing with values for font-size: clamp(…).
The fonts are so different from the stock fonts that any font swap was really jarring, so I forced early loading of the small font files and used font-display: block.
In the summer of 2023, I walked for a month from the Pacific Coast to the Sea of Japan. I crossed steep mountains including Mt. Fuji, portions of the Southern Alps, the Yatsugatake range, the Northern Alps, and the Shio no Michi Trail. In between, I walked through cities, towns, and rural areas. The hike was a substantial challenge but also a fun adventure.
Before reading it I hadn’t appreciated that EPUB files are just ZIP files with a particular folder structure and some book data. In retrospect that makes sense, but for me that single insight demystified the entire prospect of creating an ebook. It’s just a small bundle of files, mostly HTML, and some metadata.
You can use apps to make an ebook, but I wanted to build one more directly. Since the Origami website definition language is great at processing trees of content (like a folder of text and images) into new forms, I realized it could easily generate an ebook in EPUB format.
It wasn’t hard to write an Origami program to generate files in the required folder structure, and then it was just a matter of zipping it up.
Which left the question: what material could I turn into a book?
JamesG posted a good list of ideas for things people can do on their website. Facundo Olano expanded on that to suggest adding EPUB downloads for your blog or subsets of it. Their posts made me realize my own hike posts might make an interesting sample book.
During the hike I’d kept a travel diary in markdown with photos, so it was fairly easy to add a cover image, an introduction, and some metadata. Voilà: a book!
It may seem silly, but packaging something as a “book” feels weightier. Simply seeing the cover art in my ebook library alongside purchased novels was thrilling, as was opening up the book and paging through it. It felt like that day in third grade when a teacher had us bind illustrated stories into books and the school librarian put them on a library shelf. 📚
Try making an ebook — about anything — and you’ll feel the same thrill.
The site’s structure is defined in a single file in the Origami site design language that turns the sample artwork images and data into a gallery home page and a separate page for each print.
I built this to try out Snipcart, a web service for adding a shopping cart to a static site. They seem to charge lower fees for this service than the larger site hosting platforms, and it was trivial to add the shopping cart with a few HTML attributes. I love that their approach leaves you in control of the rest of your site. That said, I haven’t signed up to use Snipcart to actually complete financial transactions; if you’re interested in Snipcart, investigate it carefully.
I also used this store site to experiment with the new web View Transitions API. I was able to create a zoom effect that works across page navigations (!) which is completely nuts. Caveats: currently in Chrome/Edge/Opera only; it was hard to figure out how to do what I wanted; Chrome sometimes shows a white flash before the zoom-out animation. Still, I’m excited to see these effects coming to simple multi-page sites.
Internet archives are amazing and under-appreciated.
I searched a #Usenet archive for a program I’d written decades ago in high school: an interpreter for the Karel programming language for use in intro CS classes. Because wonderful people have maintained those archives for many years, I was able to find my program 40 years after I wrote it. https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.sources&mid=PDI5OUBzcG9jay5VVUNQPg
It’s hard to describe what it’s like to see that #C code again now. (Although I’m frankly appalled that teenage me didn’t put curly braces around one-line if clauses and for loops.)
I downloaded the source and was delighted that the ancient #Unix shell script to extract the code still runs just fine in bash. (It would take much more time to actually get the program itself to work again.) I posted the source on GitHub: https://github.com/JanMiksovsky/karel.
40 years from now, which is more likely to still exist: the USENET archive version, or the GitHub version? 🤔 I’m betting the former.