I wonder, if looking at the actual diffs of the before/after font it wouldn't be possible to write a compiler of sorts, taking a grammar, a font and a color scheme - outputting a custom font with highlighting for the grammar?

Perhaps especially if the sibling comment about embedding a state machine pans out?

you should get a nobel prize for paradigm shift xD

You should invent a new font type.

You asked what it takes to make a blog.

I have a html front page, tag pages and posts. All static.

There is a pretty short php page that takes an existing post or the dummy, chops off everything in front and behind the text.

The tag cloud sits under it. Clicking a tag injects it under the text.

When saved the top and bottom html are reatached and the title <h2> is copied into the <title> tag.

It then creates or overwrites the static html document.

It finds tags in the html and inserts a link to the new article into the tag and index pages.

Load, split, join and save is actually less complicated than sql and faster:)

Deleting tags and blogpostings is done manually.

Besides editpost.php there is a bookmarklet to inject quotes with links and youtube embeds.

I have been considering using php like that. It would solve most of my issues. The problem is that I would still like to use static hosts, like netlify or GitHub pages, and they don't support php...In addition I would have to run php on my local machine, where as I would prefer to just edit html with no setup necessary. But if anyone knows a good free host with php support, let me know!

You can run PHP in GitHub with the GitHub Actions to generate a static HTML site hosted in GitHub Pages.

So you can edit your HTML push and have a simple script to clean it before publishing it.

You can copy my blog is very simple and is generated with PHP

https://github.com/4lb0/blog

Your solution is quite nice and probably as simple as site generators get, but I was thinking of using php just for some simple includes etc. Here's my inspiration post which explains what I'm after, and why generators in general are not the solution (for me): http://ankarstrom.se/~john/articles/html2/

You could also frankenstein a front page with some js fetch. Dont even have to parse the includes. Just split and append.

If you are willing to use netlify and are willing to use PHP, what is the inhibition to use a static site generator like Hugo? It is supported by netlify and others. I believe GitHub pages also supports a bunch of static site generators.

I am using 11ty for the blog, and it works great, for now. But there's two reasons I don't like it:

1. I need to have two different versions of my site, dev and prod, which I find very restricting and fragile.

2. I don't like to rely on other people updating their npm packages just so I could publish static content. I've been burned too many times by abandoned npm packages or breaking changes.