varia.website/content/what-a-website-can-be.en.md

Title: What a website can be Author: Roel, Manetta Date: 2018-04-11 Category: article Slug: what-a-website-can-be lang: en featured_image: /images/this.gif tags: workgroup, web, publishing summary: This website is built with a static site generator. This article delves into the implications of both 'static site' and 'generator' for its design process. status: draft

When considering how to design a website for varia, our¹ 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-hosted², minimal³, portable⁴, documented⁵, FLOSS⁶ and playfull⁷ 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'.

Static site ...

Varia.zone is a static website. A static website is a 'traditional' website where all the content consists of html documents on the server's hard disk. In our case these are generated through Pelican⁸, which is a collection of Python⁹ scripts and plugins¹⁰ to turn unstyled plain text¹¹ into HTML pages. This way of working can be understood to be different to 'more modern' websites. These modern methods use server side programming languages that generate the website on the fly by querying a database. This means that everytime someone visits the site, it gets generated on demand. A static website instead gets generated once and exists as a set of documents. They are always there, not only when a visitor visits the page. Like the tree in the forest that also falls when nobody is there to hear it. Static websites are thus based on file storage wheras dynamic websites depend on recurrent computation. A website based on storage has some advantages for performance, security, portability and reproducability that we will adress in detail later in the series.

... Generator

The idea of the generator is a promising way to think about possible transformations of 'plain text' into not just web pages but different media altogether. One can imagine a single text or article morphing into widely different media such as calendar entries, RSS feeds, email newsletters, posters etc. Each of these introducing their own potentials for playful aesthetics, reading experiences and modes of distribution. This is on the one hand interesting as a form of automation that reduces (or better: re-uses) work, but more importantly as a process which necessarily will introduce new 'forms', aesthetics and publics. Aside from the aforementioned media the generative approach also allows one to involve and play with upcoming publishing protocols such as ActivityPub and webmentions.

Going back to web-development basics is a way of exploring how a website and the process of making that website can become a vehicle for understanding the web. To get a sense of the compound choices that have sedimented over time into 'web design' practices and that are opaque when using ready made frameworks. Creating something from ground up instead allows one to explore the potentials and challenge the conventions of what a website should be.

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1. Varia works via different thematic workgroups, one which is concerned with the webiste ↩︎

2. Self-hosting culture as a way to speak about network infrastructures and preferences. This is also the main subject of the homebrewserver.club, a group for discussions, learning and reflection on the practice of hosting a server from home. ↩︎

3. Minimal not as in minimalism in design but rather understood as simple/low-tech/appropriate technologies, understood in (some) aspects of Minimal Computing ↩︎

4. Portable in the sense that it allows for multiple tranformations and media, generated by various tools and distributed to various contexts and publics. ↩︎

5. What does a documented process mean? For whom? Currently the varia website is translated into two different languages (dual NL/EN), but documenting can also refer to other types of languages like explanatory articles such as this one, to accompany a work-in-progress to enable further reading than rather just 'reading the code'. ↩︎

6. FLOSS, or Free Libre and Open Source Software, refers to free culture communities and the use of free licences. ↩︎

7. The context of varia creates a playfull space that enables us to experiment with different tools, modes of address and publishing workflows. ↩︎

8. Pelican is static site generator software written in Python, getpelican.com ↩︎

9. Python is a commonly used object-oriented programming language, Python ↩︎

10. We use both the plugins made by the pelican community and our own custom ones ↩︎

11. Plain text identifies a file format and a frame of mind. (...) a kind of a systematic minimalism when it comes to our use of computers, a minimalism that privileges access to source materials, ensuring legibility and comprehension. - A quote from: Plain Text, the poetics of Computation (2017), by Dennis Tenen - Stanford University Press ↩︎