[CALUG] solution for making a web page ?

[Dave Dodge]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 11:03:38PM +0000, Walt Smith wrote:
> I'm looking for a solution as near "user" as I can get
> to making a static web page.   Short spec:   I want to make
> a static web page with series of similar images and
> corresponding descriptive text.

One option would be a static site generator such as jekyll. The basic
process is that you describe the site content using a set of text and
image files and then it generates static HTML files you can upload to
a web server. When you want to add things or make changes, you edit
the source files describing the site, re-run the generator, and
re-upload the content (perhaps using something like rsync so only
changed files get uploaded).

It does mean editing the content using a set of text files rather than
having a dedicated user interface, though. Typicallty jekyll uses
"markdown" format for text content and "YAML" format for metadata such
as the page date and title. Basically it means text looks pretty much
like this plain-text email, and you can do things like **make text
bold** by putting two asterisks on each side of it. An inline image
would be something like:

  ![caption here](/path/to/the/image.jpg)

and there's also syntax for adding custom CSS styling if you want your
text centered or images arranged in a flexbox or whatever. It can take
some experimentation to figure out the exact page code you want, but
once you've got it you can probably just cut+paste it as needed. It
has a development server that runs locally so you can try things and
see the result without it affecting your real website.

As far as a clickable image gallery, a quick search of "jekyll
gallery" finds discussions of several approaches, ranging from
manually setting up script code, to letting it read a set of images
and use an on-the-fly image-resizing service, to a plugin that reads a
directory tree of images and automatically generates the thumbnails as
local files along with jekyll pages/code to browse them:

  https://github.com/ggreer/jekyll-gallery-generator

                              -Dave Dodge/dododge at dododge.net