#1 - Sync an HTML Blog!

28/aug/2020

The first post of this website is to sync its code to GitHub. I started learning shell scripting about one year and three months ago and simple html code seems a good next choice because of its usefulness.

Watching m1xolyd1an videos about Bitcoin got me excited about html. He uses JavaScript and NodeJS, I reckon, to do maths to hash Bitcoin addresses and some html, too.

Plus, it struck me just the other day I could make my father, who is a lawyer, a website (he said he has got one but I could not find it on the internet).

Also, a friend of mine asked me to help him make a website last year and I could not be helpful (he has got a very stylish website now, he paid a professional, which I am glad for!).

Some references about website design:

Top-notch web tips: Dan's web tips (from usenet); John Bokma (from usenet); Robin Willians; Tom O'Haver -- How to Make a Web Page; CSS Tricks (advanced); Top ten mistakes in web design; Eric A. Meyer; Henri Sivonen
Acceptable or admirable website designs: Richard Stallman; Ken Thompson; Dennis Richie; Brian Kernighan also see (a), (b); Ted Nelson; Simon St.Laurent; Gringene; Luke Smith; SlackJeff (pure HTML and CSS); Thobias; Aurelio Jargas (he seems to use many programmes to generate pages); Mauro Rebelo (one of my first inspirations to start this blog, however Mauro's newer blog design is poor)
More: W3school's Tags, Tag validator; W3school's Css, Css validator; Mozilla's HTML Tags; HTML5Doctor HTML Tips; HTML5 Standards for normal developers; HTML.com Tags; Html5Doctor on Microformats; Mozilla on Microformats; CSS Selectors & Combinators (a), (b), (c), (d); ScreamingFrog Crawler, for usage see (a), (b); Many tools..

Next step, I will detach this post from the front page -- ok!

This post will have to become a rough draft for an html post skeleton for future posts..

A very good website structure is needed to be able to scale the amount of code without much frustration..

Setting meta tags for <head> seems to be majorly important.. Interestingly, Luke Smith webpage has got almost no meta tags.. Actually, many websites don't seem to care about html tags at all, with the exception of the charset and http-equiv attributes.

It has been a few days since I started studying html for this website project. Now I am checking lots of websites source code. In Firefox, just press <CTR+U> to see the source code.

This website may seem already abandoned, but in fact, I have been putting some effort in writing good source html code in the three pages this web site has already got. Specially, I was worried about the meta tags, and now many important ones are added to the <head> section of the pages.

A visitor counter is added to the home page, but visibility is not enabled and I am not sure whether leaving it on is any good, because I cannot be sure what external scripts they may be running with my visitors, plus as I will access my website the most frequently, probably it will count only my own traffic..

That would be very similar to GitHub traffic to my repos, though I am not 100% sure, much of the traffic GitHub shows me in the insight section seems to be from myself when re-cloning own repos to update them.. Sometimes it is clear there is some traffic not from me, though..

I had to finally deal with solving a problem with my vim configuration.. The problem was using a parentheses colourising plugin from Luochen1990 called rainbow, which just messed up my syntax highlighting.. I removed it and now set to using kien's rainbow parentheses which is a little harder to use and has got a hidden command RainbowParenthesesLoadChevrons but that, I am mostly sure, is to avoid new users enabling it with incompatible language highlighters on. For example, the rainbow chevrons option must not be enabled when html syntax highlighting is also enabled, unless you want to break the html syntax highlighters..

Also, installed mattn's vim-emmets plugin, which really helps with writing html tags.. I actually found that on Arch Linux User Repository (AUR) .

I am being careful to writing these canonical html source pages because if I do hurry up and write bad html sources, I would need rewriting them later at some point. When my studying of Dan's Web Tips is finished (see reference above), I will be ready..

t-shirt with html pun: how to meet ladies — Fig 1. May HTML also be read as `how to meet lads'? (credit: kris krüg)

PS: I have included a google analytics script in the home page and will leave that on for some time, just to see how that works for now.
I checked Dan's web tips website and he has got an analytics/statistics script, so maybe that is not 100% an evil thing to do.. He also seems to have had a simple visitor counter before that, which is now commented out in the page HTML code.. I checked and it reached 38000+ hits before being commented out in favor of his new analytics script..

PPS: it seems that the bad thing is not really getting website guest statistics as much as showing ads! Content quality may decrease when all the author wants is the advertisement revenue.. For example, youtube incites vlog authors to make any type of content in large quantities in order to have channel monetisation via ad views..

PPPS: one of the trackers I was testing uses a third-party services matomo [[dot]] org which seems a very suspicious company. As their advertising of user information collection and selling is so outspoken in their website, I am removing it.. I will leave Google Analytics, though.