About Richard Rathe's Reflections
How many goodly ideas are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t!
(with apologies to the Bard)
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
More documentation…