You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right -- at least if you have any experience -- because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.
-- Richard P. Feynman

Why

Most people using the internet are literate to the extent of being able to read or write. Tools are commonly available to produce media in the form of audio and video. I want to be able to share things on my terms with the minimum of commercial third parties involved. I have no objection to commercial services but I don't think free services are really free, because a bare minimum a person is acclimatising to someone else's workflow.

I used the following criteria:

• Zero advertising. No objection to advertising, just I don't consider my website a commercial venture.
• Easy to use. I want to be able to produce reasonable looking pages with the minimum of style overhead. I don't want to have to learn a complicated or esoteric markup language.
• As efficient as possible.
• Maximum compatibility, I'm not the technological equivalent of the old Amish, I'm not a web designer but at the same time don't the website to look awful on most common devices.
• Reasonably cheap. My objection to 'free' is that it often, not always, means 'free to use' which is often, not always, far more nuanced. I don't have a problem with with commercial ventures - things have costs, but I don't want to pay for things I don't need and/or don't use.

How

I use Zola. This is not a Zola tutorial - there is a tutorial on their website. The basic idea is to be able to create a webpage from any text editor in markdown.

I use Git for version control so when I inevitably make mistakes I can easily undo mistakes.

The text editor I use for this website is Vim. The operating system I run is Manjaro Linux on a Laptop so worn I have to hit the X key extra hard for it to work.

I settled on Uberhost.de for hosting. I can edit and generate the website on my laptop and upload using sftp.

The downsides/which are also upsides:

• When generating the website I'm limited to any device that can run Zola.
  • The corollary is that the website is portable. I can keep a copy on a USB stick. Were my laptop to fail I can simply install Zola on something else.
• No mobile app.
  • I have decided to use to use social media type stuff for things happening now and this blog for things I have thought about.
• A website that has approximately 3 or 4 lines of CSS.
  • There is style versus substance and I am not in a position to judge.

Storage requirements

The entire template is 92kb uncompressed (including this page).

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