This page is ongoing work in progress, and will be added to over time.
Big Web vs Small Web:
Over the years I've dabbled with various blogging platforms: Wordpress, Medium, Substack, Drupal, Joomla and back to Wordpress again. I've become weary of the amount of work involved in managing sites and the emphasis they place on monetising content. I'm tired of manipulative social media, promoting false realities and expectations. I'm tired of websites awash with pop-up banners and ads, click-bait and cookies.
We've all heard of 'PHP', right?
Originally stood for 'Personal Home Page', back in the day when personal home pages were actually a thing, back in the day when producing online content took a bit of thought and not inconsiderable effort.
Thanks to Mike Grindle's articles I've been introduced to the Small Web - back to basics, self-coded sites where simple content can shine. Complete control and the opportunity to learn new skills, without the intrusion of corporate billionaires.
Many moons ago (about 30 years) I was into computer programming as a hobby, opting for Visual Basic. I've just 'Googled' it (Wikipedia entry) and apparently it's a legacy software, support for which stopped around 20 years ago. I guess I still have a desire to dabble with programming, not having done any for about 25 years - so the 'small web' scratches that itch. It won't be as polished as Wordpress or the like, but I find it far more satisfying than 'drag and drop'.
Discovered, and fell in love with, reusable HTML components. However, I didn't pay sufficient heed to the website structure and found myself in a mess. Nested directories may be great for organising files, but a nightmare when calling components with relative file paths. I ended up with so many different versions depending on how deeply nested the calling file was.
Problem solved - I flattened the directory structure, with help from a Visual Studio Code extension which identifies broken links.
Key learning for a newbie - the file structure doesn't need to mirror the menu structure, in fact my life is much easier if it doesn't.
Colour coding of categories on the News page added as an experiment, starting 2025.
Blogs combined for the sake of simplicity bringing together the Brewing Diary and the Site Blog under the News heading.
I've returned to the Small Web, yet again. You'd think by now that the penny would have dropped and that this is where I keep returning, perhaps this time.
I'd decided the site was getting too complicated and needed a CMS (Joomla) to streamline navigation and ease management. Having resurrected Joomla, and put a lot of work into the site, I realised that a CMS wasn't helping. Because it can handle complicated sites there was a tendency to over-complicate the content with the likes of categories, sub-categories, tags, sub-tags - the CMS was exacerbating the problem. My Small Web site didn't need the additional layer of management - Keep It Simple!
Joomla has its quirks; the final straw was the way it inaccurately categorised the latest photography article I'd added: incorrectly nesting it within the breadcrumb and failing to display it within a list of categories that it had been manually assigned to.