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This One's Just for Me

An Eccentric CMS and Site Builder
June 2026

I've been making web sites since the 1900s. The earliest I can find in the Wayback Machinewayback is this snapshot of the University of Alabama Athletics site from 1999.

The home page of the University of Alabama Athletics department website from 1998. It's a white page with 'Alabama Athletics' in large crimson letters at the top with the elephant face Alabama logo beside it. Navigation for each of the sports is down the left side. There's a picture of a tennis player and a swimmer in the main content area along with a broken image indicator. The footer consistes of various links for tickets, feedback, etc...

There were other sites before it. The ones that got me the gig in the athletics department. They've been lost to time, though.

Content Management History

The web has seen dramatic changes since it came online in 1993. Some parts have remained constant. Chief among them, the need to wrangle what content goes on which page. The modern approach is to use a Content Management Systems (CMSs). An app that store content, let you edit it, then merge it into templates to generate a site.

Those systems are great, but not required. You can make each page on a site a stand-alone file.
That's where the web started. It's a pain, though. If you change a link in a footer you have to edit every page on the site to make the update. The more pages you have, the bigger the pain.

My path through the world of content management went something like this:

Up to Ruby on Rails, each approach involved writing everything from scratch. The rest had at least some portion of a CMS built-in. After leaving Next, I've gone back to the old ways. Eschewing pre-built CMS frameworks in favor of making my own.

Neopolitan and Neopoligen

Next Bullshit

My tenure with Next.js didn't last long. Two big sticking points burned me:

  1. It takes a huge amount of space.

    For example, the source code for the first version of QR Code Clockclock is ~450 MB:

    An info panel showing the size of a folder called qrclock.alanwsmith.com that lists it as being 446.9 MB

    It's now about 300 KB. Most of which is the Rick Roll GIF.

  2. It broke all the time.

Next had constant updates. Sometimes nothing broke. Other times, they did. While annoying, that's part of using a framework.

That's not what got me. What got me was it breaking when I hadn't updated or changed anything. Specifically, my site was working fine one day when I saw a typo. I update a single letter and tried to re-deploy the site. It broke.

Some external dependency had changed somewhere in a way that I couldn't see. Even though I hadn't touch the code on my site it just stopped working.

I'd already been frustrated with Next. That was the last straw. I flicked it the bird and started writing my own CMS the next day.

More than Markdown

If you work on the web, you're probably familiar with Markdown. It's the de facto way to write prose for web pages. You write a stripped down text document that transforms into all the HTML required to make headings and paragraphs.

For example, this:


# Hello, Markdown

Here's a good example sentence:

The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog.

Turns into this:


<h1>Hello, Markdown</h1>
<p>
  Here's a good example sentence:
</p>
<p>
  The quick brown fox jumps
  over the lazy dog.
</p>

Simple Site Builder

TKTKTK

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Endnotes

References

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