My most favourite short story I have written is nature adventure fuelled by the internet. I wanted to write about how using the internet can, in certain ways, be a good place to be creative and as I did so themes of 'the way things move around the globe' and 'things preserved in time' started to emerge and so I let that happen. Part of my motivation for the story was that I really like to make my own website where I can set the tone and be myself. So it seems right to explain how I made and continue to make my website, after all, writing it feels as important to being a cartoonist as learning perspective or crafting stories to tell.
I think that maybe I can best describe my website by showing how it is organised. One way I organise the website is to keep the words I want to appear on screen as separate as possible from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. For example the browser needs to know what is a heading, what is a paragraph, what is navigation. That information comes by surrounding the writing you want see on screen with tags that the browser can interpret as being the paragraph part or the heading or navigation part of the text.
The tags come from long standing recommendations from the W3C that have, over the years, been reliably taken into account by browser developers. However, although the tags are defined to some degree it is up to personal choice how they are applied to any particular piece of writing.
Designing the site to be mostly monthly update posts means that each post has the same format so that means the tags can be fitted in a reliable pattern. The article element represents a complete, or self-contained, composition in a document. A monthly update seems to fit that description very nicely. A heading can be included within the article tag which adds to the description of the article and so can the paragraphs of monthly update text which may be grouped into sections if the post covers several topics each with it's own section. I decided to leave the navigation out of the article as the two forms of navigation that I have are the breadcrumb trail back to the home page, and the other navigation is articles that are chronologically related and so are not necessarily links that have the same topic as the article.
Another part of the website to organise is the site file structure. I wanted to keep the homepage, that is the page that loads when someone visits the domain, quite spare, giving myself the freedom to add new sections to the website in the future. I wanted the monthly pages to be collated by years so that you can read all the monthly entries for that year on one page. The title of the monthly update on the year page would link you through to the individual month's page. I decided that it would be just the latest year page that would be linked from the homepage. So the file structure begins with the homepage and any related pages like the about page and then a directory for each of the years I have written monthly updates for and within the year directories there is a directory for each of the monthly pages numbered from one (for January) to twelve (for December).
By designing the website around monthly updates with a reliable pattern and navigation links that also follow a pattern because of the site's file structure it became possible to begin to separate the words on the screen from the extra details the browsers needs to display those words. I wrote some code that takes the writing of the monthly updates that are in text files suitably labelled for the month and year and puts HTML tags around the appropriate bits and organises the pages into the file structure I described.
Writing a piece of software that you really want to use opens up a world, where you become invested in exploring the many ways this task could be accomplished. I have found one solution to making a website, but I am aware that there are other ways I could do the same thing. I could move the data around my program in a different way or try using the coding language differently. Because of the way I keep track of my code development with git I can branch out and try things, all of it monitored and recorded in fine detail.
Writing a program to manage my website has an added advantage which is that I can use the organised information to make other things, for example some Really Simple Syndication or an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a way to let you, an interested party, know when new things become available to read on the site. By choosing an RSS feed reader and adding the object group RSS feed a feed reader will regularly check for updates and let you know if there are any new additions by providing you with a link to the relevant part of the site.
There are a few other details of the website that I haven't mentioned here, like the styling and the tool I have made to ensure every part of the website is under version control and my plans to add images to the site, as they seem to require a post to themselves. Which is something to look forward to in the future.