Why my sites are flat HTML. Yes, still.

My sites run on files.

I have a personal hub, a work site, a music site, this blog, a site for my children's book, and grime95.com[1]Ref. 1grime95.com grime95.com. They look very different and do different jobs, but they all deliver HTML[2]Ref. 2HTML developer.mozilla.org, CSS, images, and JavaScript where the page needs it. GitHub Pages[3]Ref. 3GitHub Pages pages.github.com serves the files. There isn't an application framework or a CMS behind the page, and I don't have my own build server to babysit.

The hosting bill is zero. Domain registration still costs money, unfortunately. Apparently having strong opinions about JavaScript doesn't get you out of that bill. Damned shame.

Before somebody catches me with a Python script and declares the whole thing a fraud: some of the files are generated. There is a build step.

The build happens before publication. You don't need Python working on my machine to read what it produced. GitHub Pages still has deployment machinery, too, so I haven't abolished computers. I've taken my own application runtime out of the request path.

A generator can need repairs while yesterday's generated page keeps serving. My authoring environment can get out of date without taking the content down with it, and I want to keep those failures separate. I'd rather change a paragraph because I have something to change than because a dashboard grew another warning badge.

My sites are patpadgett.com[4]Ref. 4patpadgett.com patpadgett.com, work[5]Ref. 5work work.patpadgett.com, music[6]Ref. 6music music.patpadgett.com, blog[7]Ref. 7blog blog.patpadgett.com, Octavitin[8]Ref. 8Octavitin octavitin.patpadgett.com, and grime95. They publish things to read, hear, or look at. Sending you a file works fine for that.