Free and Open Source Software

For a simple personal website though, I’d recommend using a markdown editor, then either export it through a template,

This is what a static site generator does.

https://staticgen.com/

You can even use Markdown file and convert it dynamically to HTML using javascript through Markdeep by just dropping

<!-- Markdeep: --><style class="fallback">body{visibility:hidden;white-space:pre;font-family:monospace}</style><script src="markdeep.min.js"></script><script src="https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/latest/markdeep.min.js?"></script><script>window.alreadyProcessedMarkdeep||(document.body.style.visibility="visible")</script>

at the end of the markdown file. It makes it dead simple to update using a text editor later on and to host on a static website.

I second the idea of finding a way to make your website using markdown and a template, that’s what I do for https://kashifshah.sdf.org

Have made numerous mockups for devs, as a PM, that way.

When you have one style sheet for users and admins, you get creative.

At the time, building it wasn’t my problem. Explaining what needed to be built was, and the devs in question were not native speakers of same language I was.

Show, not tell, works quite well IFF you recognize immediately when it’s needed.

Copy the thing you want from where it is, paste it where it needs to be, and tweak the (easily recognisable by any human, cmon) verbiage.

I’m not a particularly visual person, so dev tools was quite useful for that. “${foreach} state, ${foreach} county, ${foreach} postal code,” here is the expected UI both expanded and not, beats hell out of trying to spec out what amounts to the better part of an RFC, especially when I am not the one actually writing the code and also not the one who came up with the straight up crazy schema.

Schema created years ago, and there’s only money to add this UI to replace an UPDATE WHERE that the boss decided he didn’t like because he didn’t “get it” and couldn’t personally do it if ever needed (literally no world where it would be needed, and boss didn’t understand the geo that made the whole thing necessary, but…. That’s life.)

(Edit: created, not ‘creates’, and FreeMarker is brutal. Things that binary work/do not work belong in code, not templates. Templates should be as tolerant as is sane given a use case. Boss wouldn’t know HTML or a variable if I whacked him over the head with a variable (length walking staff))