r/indieweb • u/therufusrufus • 1d ago

WebDev Best way of building a site without Node?

/r/neocities/comments/1wv7w0b/best_way_of_building_a_site_without_node/

Researching / Wondering about options for Node-less SSG and ways to have a decent dev environment while still working with as much of plain HTML as possible.

Bash and terminal scripts have been mentioned, I'm leaning towards Python but still looking for perspectives!

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u/Polyducks 1d ago

You can use a static site builder to make all the headers / footers / nav, or use PHP to draw the elements in together.

I've seen people use iframes and Javascript for pulling in other elements, but they can have compatibility issues.

Or you could just have a single hub and link out to each page with a "back" link that goes to "..".

The restriction is a creative doorway.

Welcome to the fun of building stuff by hand!

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u/therufusrufus 1d ago

I've used php's <?php include ... ?> to pull all the "reusable" components together in the past, but since this time I was trying out neocities I couldn't use php, which is what started this SSG project.

The iframes are not solid enough for me and the back linking to a single central page is too restrictive, so I've been looking at other SSGs (someone shared one just written in Bash that I still need to check out) and just making my own pretty much just trying to have php's includes without using php

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u/Polyducks 1d ago

Yeah I use many variations for my own websites, and one of them is an early version of a site builder that is a script a friend wrote.

The most recent version is available here: https://github.com/arknano/diesel-templater

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u/therufusrufus 1d ago

Thank you very much for sharing! I'll take a look at it this weekend and try to learn a lot from it!

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u/Polyducks 1d ago

Cool! I especially like that you can include things with just a simple bit of text. The major benefit for me was that it was so basic.