Weltraumbesty // 00002 // 8th of January 2025 // Read the technical specifications of Weltraumbesty

As should be immediately evident from its presentation, Weltraumbesty is a very simple website, and was developed to strike what I feel is a decent balance between minimalism and functionality. A lot of what has become the norm for blogging in the last couple of decades - sidebars, search bars, tag clouds, variously organized archives, comment sections, etc. - felt entirely unnecessary here. No shame to those who choose to present their content that way. I did as well, and for a very long time, but always found that stuff more distracting than useful.

Opinions on the matter will obviously vary, but my response to those distractions is to simply not implement them.

Weltraumbesty is composed exclusively of basic-bitch html with some equally basic CSS declaration to keep things organized, presentable and (hopefully) appropriately scalable on mobile devices. Each page contains the full layout, and while that may impede loading speed I'd wager that the ~hundred lines of code present here aren't taxing my web server or your browser to any significant degree.

This site was also built using nothing but open source software. Gedit was used to compose the layout itself and format individual pages, images were composed in Gimp and Darktable, with all work-checking done in Firefox. Transparent PNG's are used where possible because they make me feel clever, and for someone who made a website and is now writing about making a website, feeling clever is obviously very important.

And so long as I'm bragging, all of this was done on an Arch Linux install (i3wm, no DE) that I configured over the holidays while 1st degree murdering my Windows 11 installation to death. Arch is great, btw, and not the bugbear to install that various tech 'tubers would have you believe. Even without prior experience with Arch itself (I've used a lot of other distros over the years, and still keep a rock solid Pop!_os install as a fallback) a manual installation, no script shortcut, took all of an hour on my machine, with a few extra hours required to install necessary packages and tweak i3 to my liking. Try it sometime.

It bothers me, as I'm sure it bothers some others, that bespoke home-spun websites have become such a rarity. For those with actual business interests the various and sundry integrations with pay processors, advertising, and social media companies is probably necessary to some extent or other, and theming through Wordpress or Squarespace or whatever-the-fuck certainly makes that easier. But I just want to write shit and run some risk of someone actually reading it, unimpeded by any external economic considerations (outside of my kofi link, natch). As such there're no ads here, no tracking, no nothing. What you see is what you get. And what you don't see looks like this (with some minor varation, depending on the page):



<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
	<head>
			<meta charset="utf-8">
			<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>#title_text</title>
		<style type="text/css">
		body{
		     background-color:#545250;
		     margin: 10px auto;
		     max-width: 600px;
		     line-height:1.4;
		     font-family:Monaco, monospace;
		     font-size:16px;
		     color:#e0dcd5;
		     padding:0 10px;
		     }
		h1,h2,h3
		     {
		      line-height:1.2
		     }
		a    {
		     color:#f6f2eb;
		     }
		</style>
	</head>

	<body>

	<header>

<!--// header image //--!>	
	
<img src="#IMAGE" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;"></img>

<!--// tagline //--!>

<center><aside style="font-size:small;"><i>#tagline</i></aside></center>

<hr>

<!--// top menu //--!>

<center>
<div style="font-size:x-small;">
<a href="" target="new">#menu_item</a> // 
<a href="#">
#menu_item_New_Tab</a>
<br> // 
<a href="mailto:#">
#menu_email</a>
</div>
</center>
<hr>
	</header>

<!--// page title //--!>

<h2 style="text-align:center;">
#Title
</h2>

<!--// page meta //--!>

<p style="font-size:small;text-align:center;">
#meta
</p>

<hr>

<br>

<!--// content //--!>

<!--// full image //--!>

<img src="#IMAGE" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;"></img>

<!--// left image //--!>

<div style="text-align:left;padding:0 8px 2px 0;"><img src="#IMAGE" style="
max-width:30%;height:auto;"></img></div>

<!--// right image //--!>

<div style="text-align:right;padding:0 0 2px 8px;"><img src="#IMAGE" style="
max-width:30%;height:auto;"></img></div>

<hr> 

<~-// page navigation //--!>

<p style="text-align:center;text-style:bold;font-size:small;">
← 
<a href="#">previous</a>
 // 
 <a href="#">home
 </a> ↵ // 
 <a href="#">next</a>
  →
</p>
<hr>

<!--// footer text //--!>

<p style="font-size:small;font-style:italic;">
#footer
</p>

<hr>

<!--// copyright statement //--!>

<p style="font-size:small;font-style:bold;text-align:center;">&copy; #copyright_agent</p>

	</body>

</html>

And that's it. All of it. More specific text formatting is managed with html mark-up for individual words within a paragraph and CSS styling where required for blocks of text. No muss. No fuss. Easy.

The point of all this, such as there is one: I really wish there were more simple-ass website out there, or that more people considered building one as an alternative to hopping eternal between the glut of alienating social platforms that are turning the forward-facing internet into a such a characterless and homogeneous pile of shit. To that end I have built this simple-ass website and exampled it all above.

if you enjoyed this shit then please consider throwing us a buck or two. we wander the wastes of intergalactic space in search of a new home, free from war and traffic accidents, and are powered by coffee alone. thank you.