The “fun” of creating a site
I had a time when I was in love with React. I wanted to do every site
using React.
Probably because I was comfortable with it.
It was the time that Single Page Applications were the thing.
But React adds a lot of complexity both in development and on the client
and I finally realized that.
Currently I am a simple man, I have to do a simple website, I do it in
pure HTML. That minimalistic approach is generally sufficient enough,
because let’s face it, we won’t need the fancy stuff there.
I’ve seen companies that wanted a landing page and were persuaded to
have a WordPress, with a blog and some fancy plugins. Probably because
they thought they would use it.
Most of the time they don’t.
Also most of the time the blog page has one entry and all the fancy
plugins are just running idle. But the company that was making that
landing page made more money because of that. So good on them I
guess.
Dangers of the fancy stuff
The other drawback besides money is security. WordPress is notorious in the field of oopsie doodles update our tool because we are a fool. All the time we hear stories about hacked sites, some plugins allowing remote code execution and so on. And it is not just WordPress. WordPress is just easy to point out for how often it is (mis)used or targeted.
Example
I remember my wife working part time in one of the companies a couple
years back. I don’t want to share specific details of the job, but let’s
just say it was in the health field, so pretty serious business. They
were just opening and wanted to do some marketing and a form that would
allow customers to schedule an appointment.
They didn’t even fully open yet and the site was already hacked and
stuffed with a malicious JS script that was showing porn content on
first entry. Of course it was out-of-date WordPress.
Over the years I realized that complexity does not go hand in hand
with security. If I want a simple site and I don’t want to be bothered
by the maintenance I should go with a simple solution.
Recently I did a site for my client as freelance work. He wanted to do a
landing page and wanted to have the possibility of updating one file
every week, because he was required to do that by law.
I could’ve done some CMS and be done, but I just decided that this
client won’t use 99% of any CMS possibilities, so let’s just do a one
page admin panel and be done with it. I used Firebase Auth so the login
process is already handled and some JS so the file is uploaded to the
Firebase Storage and that’s all. Nothing fancy, works fine and is as
simple as possible.
My site
For my site I also wanted things to be simple, so I don’t have to
worry that something will blow. And knowing how the universe works, it
would blow when I was so busy I wouldn’t have been able to handle
that.
So I just did like 5 HTML files, added some decent styling with help of
AI and I have like one line of JS that updates the year to the current
one in the footer.
For blogging purposes I decided to use Markdown files that are converted
by pandoc to HTML and that’s it. When I want to write
something, I can do it in markdown, run a simple script, deploy it in
seconds as another static HTML file and I am done. So why am I
mentioning that?
The traffic
Since I started with the site most of the users were unable
to navigate properly and constantly received 404. You can think that
maybe I made some mistakes when creating a site and the hyperlinks go
nowhere? Or maybe those users are just not very good with
computers?
Nope. Those users are trying to go to routes that don’t exist
on purpose. And by users I mean bots.
Take a look at the traffic:
I don’t remember having any php, so why are you asking?
There is also a lot of interest in my .env files. Good
luck finding them in a static HTML site without any framework.
Stats are also pretty interesting.
| Status | Count |
|---|---|
| 404 | 1083 |
| 200 | 135 |
So ~90% of all calls were trying to reach something that does not exist. Fun.
To sum it up
I am happy I just did a simple site. I can just look at my logs,
smile with some pity and do something else. I wanted a simple site, so
it is easy to maintain. And it is.
I just ran a pandoc so this post could be rendered and I am
done for the day.
Simple is sufficient. We should do more simple pages.