[agentwiggles]

I recently started a new blog / personal site, replacing an old Jekyll blog I hadn't touched since 2016. This time I decided to just write plain old HTML, with the minor concession of using Tailwind for styling because I wanted to learn it.

It's been wildly fun, and using plain HTML has made the site really flexible and fun to develop in a way that static site generators never were. As an example, today I wanted to add a small footer to a code sample to link back to the originating commit on GitHub, and it was just a div, a, and span away. No bullshit, just put the elements there and all of a sudden it's on the screen!

Another benefit has been just getting more familiar with HTML and CSS instead of letting a framework do the heavy lifting. Since restarting my site, I've felt a lot more confident when sitting down to write templated html or a react component or whatever during my day job.

I totally share your enthusiasm for this link, and find the site incredibly inspirational - this is exactly the kind of digital garden I hope my site can become. Mine is a little more sterile at the moment, but the beauty of each page being static HTML instead of a rendering of some template is that the style can evolve over time, and I'll be able to go back to old posts and see them in their original state.

The internet is still fun!

[xmonkee]

How are you doing tailwind with static html? If you are looking for a solution check out twind with the “shim” as a cdn import.

[agentwiggles]

I'm using the standalone Tailwind CLI, which means I don't need to have any trace of node in my repo. It has a watch mode which I run while coding - that makes sure that any new Tailwind CSS directives I add to source code get added to the site CSS file.

Overall it's a really nice workflow, and doesn't feel overly invasive, or overly divergent from the point of writing the site in plain HTML. I really like Tailwind - it feels similar enough to writing vanilla CSS but has some guardrails and affordances for responsiveness that I think make it well worth the small extra setup.

I've just been adding Tailwind classes inline on elements thus far, although I'm starting to repeat myself enough that I'll probably make some custom classes with the @apply directive soon.

Overall really enjoying it!