new static website

i started this website as a static html website, and then if i remember correctly around 2009 i started using wordpress which is a long time since then, and it has come full circle because as of 2025-08-04, this is my new minimalist, static website that fully functions on html and css files without any content management system or database server running in the background. this site even has zero javascript and uses almost classless css for styling.

i could add more style even with just simple css and html, however, i am going for a minimalist look and feel. i want to keep as little code as possible. i had migrated another site from wordpress to markdown some 4 or so years ago, and i wish I had done this sooner on my blog.

so why did i do this?

minimalism

it did not happen suddenly, but over the past 10 years i have been slowly moving towards a minimalist lifestyle. i do not own a car, i mostly wear white or black t-shirts, am a vegan, do not have social media apps on my phone, use vim as my text editor, mostly spent time in terminal when i am on my computer, and keep my notes in markdown, which is mostly just plain text files. it has been 3 months since i started sleeping on the floor - i really want to talk about all of this, and i am hoping that removing barriers from inception to writing will help me blog more.

wordpress

there have been many times when i logged into my wordpress site after a long period of time only to discover that the software was severely outdated and it needed to be upgraded. it is always better to keep anything that publicly faces the internet to be up-to-date as often developers will patch in security updates before they release feature changes. however, there is always the risk that an update might “fix” something that was never broken, inadvertently breaking something that cannot be fixed - hmm… poetically ironic.

also, it might make sense for larger websites with multiple writers and editors to have a proper content management system like wordpress, but for a personal blog wordpress is overkill, and so my only regret for doing away with wordpress is not having done it sooner.

how do i manage my static website?

first, i started with a template, that has the metadata for the page in yaml format. for example the metadata for this page is:

---
title: "new static website"
posted: "2025-08-07"
abstract: "using markdown files and a few simple python and shell scripts, i was able to convert my old wordpress blog into a full static website that runs on pure html and css "
type: "page"
status: "publish"
tag:
  - markdown 
  - wordpress
  - minimalist

...

step 1: the writing process

and then i just start writing, adding appropriate headings and images if and when needed.

step 2: creating indexes

after i am done writing, i then use a python script that adds or updates index pages for year, month, tags with a link to the page. at this point everything including links are in markdown and the file extension is still ‘.md’

step 3: converting markdown to html

i then run bash script that i have written that uses pandoc to convert markdown files to html.

step 4: publishing

after making sure the html looks fine, i use git to push the page to the server. the new article is now live.

my new open source project

i am working on releasing the code to public so anyone can create simple sites with markdown.