How to create a tiny website for hosting on own domain.

[csearle]

Just back from Everest armed with pictures and the odd tale. I have a domain and fancy creating a small website (or maybe just one web page) with an account of my trip including pictures. I could just write the HTML page myself but wondered if anyone knows of any software that would allow me to quickly generate a lean site.

I am not interested in arrangements where it is hosted at cost on a third party's servers. I just want it to compile to a few pages that I can upload to my site.

Any ideas team?

Thanks,
Chris

[csearle]

PS I don't intend it to be a blog. I thought that I could provide a link back to a thread on TLF for that. Might help get a few more Fools on board.

[tjh290633]

Chris, I've written a lot of simple web pages. They are not difficult provided that you use Notepad to write them. I found a webpage about 25 years ago that set out the essentials. If I can find it I will send you a copy.

Terry

[csearle]

Might just do it in Word and save as HTML. It is easier to knock up the formatting than writing the raw HTML. C.

[chas49]

A quick search came up with a number of online editing tools. This one (no connection and not tested by me) looks promising.

https://onlinehtmleditor.dev/

[Lanark]

Heres a good list
https://github.com/myles/awesome-static-generators

[Mike4]

One thing no-one has mentioned is the page could do with being 'responsive', i.e. being in different formats depending on if the visitor is viewing on a computer or a mobile phone.

[tjh290633]

Might just do it in Word and save as HTML. It is easier to knock up the formatting than writing the raw HTML. C.

I find that doing that mucks up the HTML no end. Lots of needless tags appear.

TJH

[kyu66]

Just back from Everest armed with pictures and the odd tale. I have a domain and fancy creating a small website (or maybe just one web page) with an account of my trip including pictures. I could just write the HTML page myself but wondered if anyone knows of any software that would allow me to quickly generate a lean site.

I am not interested in arrangements where it is hosted at cost on a third party's servers. I just want it to compile to a few pages that I can upload to my site.

If you are ok with authoring your content using markdown, then a simple static website builder would fit the bill, have a look at Hugo.
https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/

You write markdown pages, add in images etc, style as you wish and run a local webserver to see the output. When happy tell hugo to build a public site and it creates a folder structure for you to upload to your website. Plenty of themes to choose from and they are responsive. Much simpler than faffing with Wordpress et al.

[U962]

Find an old copy of MS frontpage on Ebay.
I do the mods on a simple site on behalf of the non techie owner with a number of static pages and that's what I use to modify them.

[Mike4]

Find an old copy of MS frontpage on Ebay.
I do the mods on a simple site on behalf of the non techie owner with a number of static pages and that's what I use to modify them.

Will that run on anything higher than Win 7?

An excellent program but ISTR being forced to dump it due to backward incompatibility.

[mc2fool]

Find an old copy of MS frontpage on Ebay.
I do the mods on a simple site on behalf of the non techie owner with a number of static pages and that's what I use to modify them.

Will that run on anything higher than Win 7?

Yes, I'm still using FrontPage 2000 on Windows 10, although I do use it mostly in HTML mode. It's really a case of inertia-cum-lethargy for me. It works ok for my needs (which are just occasional edits to existing sites) and I can't be bothered to look for and check out any replacements, or upgrade (I make lots of use of "include" files, which FP handles well, although I'm sure other tools will also). However, it is ancient history now and I'm sure there are better current choices around.

Just back from Everest armed with pictures and the odd tale. I have a domain and fancy creating a small website (or maybe just one web page) with an account of my trip including pictures. I could just write the HTML page myself but wondered if anyone knows of any software that would allow me to quickly generate a lean site.

Not got an answer to that but as you mention pictures, without knowing what you actually have in mind, I just thought I'd give a heads up that there are lots of image gallery/slide show templates around that you may find useful.

W3Schools have a number and their stuff usually works out of the box. Here's one: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_slideshow.asp.

If you click "Try it yourself" it'll show you a fully working page (in a frame) and you can copy and save the source in the left hand frame and edit from there. (Personally, if I were to use that example I'd change the JS to dynamically write the HTML for the image divs etc from a table of filenames & captions... )

Alternatively, if your server has PHP and you're familiar with that there's plenty of example code to show a slide show of all images in a folder, so avoiding you having to edit anything if/when you add a new image. Google for "php slideshow from folder".

[Mike4]

Will that run on anything higher than Win 7?

Yes, I'm still using FrontPage 2000 on Windows 10, although I do use it mostly in HTML mode. It's really a case of inertia-cum-lethargy for me. It works ok for my needs (which are just occasional edits to existing sites) and I can't be bothered to look for and check out any replacements, or upgrade (I make lots of use of "include" files, which FP handles well, although I'm sure other tools will also). However, it is ancient history now and I'm sure there are better current choices around.

Well that's interesting. I used FP98 for all my websites and was so impressed with it I bought FP2000 when it came out, which was even better. Best WYSWIG website design prog I've ever used by a country mile but mobile phones were getting ever more popular as a platform for web browsing and FP isn't 'responsive' and Google was down-ranking non-responsive sites in their rankings. So I needed a site design tool that produced versions for mobile phones too and this coincided with yet another Windows update that busted my computa. I lost patience with Windows/Microsoft, switched to Apple and never looked back.

[UncleEbenezer]

WYSWIG website design prog

A contradiction in terms. What you see is not what I get, and may indeed bear little or no resemblance to it. That's by design: the "M" of HTML stands for Markup, which is in sharp contrast to display/format and enables flexibility to adapt to different devices.

Microsoft's tools in that field were among the worst. They were designed to create pages that "worked" well with an out-of-the-box Microsoft browser but presented problems with others, thus (by design) making the competition look bad. Note the past tense here, but when you mention FP98, that suggests a date when the rot was strong.

As for "responsive", that's IME a euphemism for a website looking like powerpoint and devoid of anything useful. Another generation of pure crap, after the nonsense of WYSINWOG ("what you see is not what others get") had receded. HTML is naturally responsive to different devices, if only you don't bugger it up.

[U962]

So @Uncle....
What do you recommend instead as a web site program?

[James]

So @Uncle....
What do you recommend instead as a web site program?

programme? real websites are written in pico or Vi.

[UncleEbenezer]

So @Uncle....
What do you recommend instead as a web site program?

programme? real websites are written in pico or Vi.

On the rare occasions I've written a static page, I've always used vi (never really used pico except within pine). Or else I've posted to someone else's readymade system like wordpress or phpbb (the latter being what powers lemonfool). Something like a wordpress page would probably be a line of least resistance for the OP.

It's been a while since I did anything active, but I do have some feathers to my cap. When I first heard of google pagerank I happened to have several pages with very high rank (several PR8 and a 9), not by virtue of any of the snake-oil now known as SEO, but by having genuinely useful contents and links from the best places. I also served for some years as Invited Expert with the W3C.

[yorkshirelad1]

Not quite what you're looking for, but how about using Google Photos (or equivalent) to mount your photos; you could write some text in LIbreOffice, save a page of text as a JPG in Libre Office Writer (File / Export / JPG), and slot the resulting "slide" of text (in JPG) in the sequence of photos.

[GoSeigen]

Might just do it in Word and save as HTML. It is easier to knock up the formatting than writing the raw HTML. C.

OMG

[csearle]

W3Schools have a number and their stuff usually works out of the box. Here's one: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_slideshow.asp

Clearly there are many ways of going about this but I had a look at W3Schools as you suggested and pretty quickly achieved the effect I am after.

So that I can add in photos as and when I get them I'm planning to write a little C++ program¹ to generate the necessary HTML from a config file. The config file will also be largely automated using the directory where the files are stored.

Thanks for all the ideas team!

Chris


¹ I use C++ Builder and from a past life in programming am really quite speedy in knocking up programs