About Richard Rathe's Reflections

What Is This?

I started this site in 2004 as my journal of ideas—a place to catch glimpses of what I’d been thinking about over the years. It was a single HTML page that I edited directly. In late 2006 I rebuilt the site from the ground up using XHTML and CSS. In late 2008 I again rebuilt the site as a WordPress instance. In 2010 I created a new theme I called Photogrey and hooked the site up to my Twitter feed. In 2022 I left Twitter and added a link to Mastodon.

My main criticism of Wordpress was feature bloat. It has become a huge program with many dependences. The code it generates is non-standard and very hard to debug. As of this writing there is a fight going on between WP factions that I do not want to deal with.

In 2024 I decided to go in a different direction—the results of which are now before you.

Welcome to BLIS!

Design Goals

• Self-Contained (Portable) Single Topic Articles
  • each article is contained in it's own free-standing directory
  • original files are either plain text or HTML
• Entire Site is Self-Contained
  • relative URLs used for basic structure
  • works the same with or without a server
• Escape the Timeline
  • blend new, old, & updated articles automatically
• Single Index Page
  • article summaries generated automatically
  • responsive layout
• Hierarchical Organization
  • providing top level organization
• Work With the Browser
  • standard forward/backward navigation
  • minimize network traffic, support local caching
  • minimize javascript, avoid large js libraries
  • web standards throughout
• Automatic Updates When Left Unattended
  • server-side script running as a cron job
• Original Files Retained on Author's Computer
  • new/edited articles copied to server via FTP
  • no need for server-side backups

I generate articles using KIST markup, but this is not required.

Author

Richard Rathe

More documentation…

How Was It Made?