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I've been enjoying the "<tadi web>" approach Lu ha...
# devlog-together
i
I've been enjoying the "tadi web" approach Lu has been espousing lately. I also had some nice discussions at Strange Loop with Devine and a few others about minimizing friction / dependencies / build steps, both broadly but also specifically pertaining to publishing one's personal site. So in this spirit, I've been reworking my personal site a bit. I plan to finally add RSS and, even though it goes against the spirit of Lu and Devine's approaches, add a more complex build process that enables some functionality I've long wanted.
e
(screaming “yes”)
k
2023 was the year I switched my site to static html after 14 years of Rails. Is there more to tadi web than using an SSG? I suppose something like Gatsby doesn't feel very tadi. My Lua generator is 400 lines, which seems shockingly large now I look at it..
e
I don’t wanna talk for Lu, but in my understanding of the tadi web it is less about a tech stack, and more about doing the thing — like actually posting to your personal website regularly, and broadly
k
Ah. I certainly don't post to my website very often, though it's not dead. When I first created it, I cared about having a lot of stuff that didn't show up on the frontpage but was the underwater 90% of the iceberg that you could search for or get to by clicking a link. Over time I've let that underwater portion die. Most of my "digital garden" is private. (It's not clear to me that doing things more publicly is in itself valuable. It's valuable for some people if it gets you to write more and think more. But I'm probably arguing against something nobody actually said.)
i
Is there more to tadi web than using an SSG?
My site was just hand-written HTML, with a tiny build script so that I could start most pages with something like 
<!-- import ../../header -->
Talking to Devine at StrangeLoop, they suggested using an iframe instead, and not having the build step at all. I find this really appealing.
> Most of my "digital garden" is private. Yeah — we've bonded over this idea before. Very fond of writing that is public but not linked from anywhere (I guess "unlisted" is the YouTube term for this). I believe Kevin Lynagh does this to good effect.
e
I do this! I have a bunch of pages that are technically “wiki” pages that aren’t really discoverable without a directly link
d
I write HTML and CSS by hand, which is why my website looks so basic. It needs https://svelte.dev/ or something.
e
RSS only content is also a fun way to have a secret club
a
My read of that tadi site is that the test if something is tadi is if you can easily rebuild it or fix parts that are broken. Concrete tests might be: delete the build script then get the site working again; switch computers then get the site working again; pretend Lua no longer exists then get the site working again; etc.
k
I am also working on simplifying my blog and digital garden, starting with the former. The first step was to get rid of almost all JS code, except the bit required to display comments from Mastodon. Also a more sober layout at the occasion of replacing the theme. Next, I want to downsize the static site generator. I use Coleslaw, which is mid-size as SSGs go. But it has a lot of functionality I will never need, plus extension mechanisms (plugins etc.) that I don't need either. I have just one blog! So I plan to strip out as much as possible, and I hope to end up with a small and easily understandable code base. My digital garden is a more difficult story. It's published as a TiddlyWiki, which makes for a nice reading experience, a built-in search engine, and convenient offline reading. At the price of requiring JavaScript and forcing a download of all pages for reading a single one. I have no good idea yet for doing better.
Question to those of you who write plain HTML: do you have any special tooling for that? I tried, because I like the idea, but I find all those tags too distracting when writing. Good tooling support (something like a good Emacs mode) might help, but I don't know of any.
k
No, I just chew through the glass 😄 I actually started out with a weird markdown-like syntax 15 years ago. But I've gradually gotten rid of it.
l
@Ivan Reese there's no reason a build process can't be tadi. i use various build processes in my site! in fact it's an open question/problem to solve. how to be slippy even with a build process
@Kartik Agaram the most tadi website is just some text that you host somewhere. for example, here's a tadi website I just made. i hosted it in a slack comments thread. -- WEBSITE START -- Super-tadi example website • This is perhaps the most tadi website in existence. • I can easily rebuild it from scratch. • And host it anywhere. -- WEBSITE END --
@Eli Mellen i definitely feel like it doesn't have to be a tech stack, more like an 'approach' i guess? the fact that it lets you post a lot is just one of many benefits! but also i don't get to say what the tadi web is. you can say what is and isn't the tadi web, without needing to check from me :)
@alltom yes this is mainly how i think about it! inspired by my awful awful awful memory forgetting things all the time. good practice for the upcoming 
climate apocalypse
@Konrad Hinsen i mostly write markdown, and switch to html within a markdown file when i need more. also i keep it aggressively simple
@ everyone happy to see tadi web pop up here. the truth is i don't know what the tadi web is, and i don't get to say what it is. please feel free to say what is and isn't the tadi web, and claim it as your own, and claim membership in its community! it's ok if you get it wrong - we can just rebuild it one thing i would say is: be open-minded about it. many ppl have gut reactions to things like javascript, build steps, dependencies. there's no reason they can't be slippy, or be part of the tadi web. maybe it's just that nobody has figured out how to do it yet. if you're interested in reading more about the tadi web pls feel free to read the posts I've written about it here: https://www.todepond.com/wikiblogarden/tadi-web/
a
@Konrad Hinsen I write straight HTML and keep it simple by leaving out every optional opening or closing tag. Check the source of alltom.com.
image.png
I patterned it after the way Mike Bostock (the d3 guy) writes HTML
i
I also often leave out closing tags. I patterned it after the oooold colorglare.com (RIP) Makes sense, considering avoiding closing braces is one reason I continue to use CoffeeScript. Which... suddenly makes me want to create my own whitespace indentation markup language. Butterfly meme: "is this SLIPPY MINDSET?"
l
@Ivan Reese just keep it slippy ok 🤝
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