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When considering how to design a website for varia, our[^1] mutual but implicit understanding was not to *just* make a site. But rather that there was a potential for the process of site-making to become a process of exploring what a website can be. Exploring how one could do web publishing in a self-hosted[^2], minimal[^3], portable[^4], documented[^5], FLOSS[^6] and playfull[^6b] way. In a way that connects to the multiplicity of practices that varia consists of. This text is the beginning of an attempt to make explicit and put to words some of the ideas and questions that drove this process. In the spirit of release early, release often we will publish a series of texts as we develop this site. Hopefully this can trigger questions on web design in the conceptual sense, not as a practice only involved with visual language, but as a practice considering on-line publishing ecosystems. One of the fundamental choices we made early on was to use a static site generator as our publishing tool, so we'll start by introducing the concepts of both 'static site' and 'generator'. |
