Switching my website to php

(and adding a blog!)

PHP?

I know, everyone hates PHP. You're all wrong. As far as I can tell, the popular opinion on PHP is the same as C - everyone learning to program is told its terrible and cryptic and hard to use, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

why?

I am mostly dodging actual responsibilities.

Also, I have opinions on modern web design. In the year 2026, why should any website take more than a second or two to fully load on even a poor network connection? Why are we making your browser do all the work to render js garbage when it could be static?

I am a firm believer that if I am serving you a website that requires something to be actively handled, I should do it myself. I don't even make money from this, but imagine if I did, and still made your browser do all the work. Rude, right? PHP does everything server-side, and with a properly designed website, that isn't much - I use Cloudflare for DNS and they cache stuff too.

This is all a static webpage after one request anyway...

what's going on here then?

Shoutout to Cristy94's markdown-blog PHP blog backend. I've wanted to set up a proper blog for a while now to document projects I do, but haven't wanted to write every post in html, which is a pretty clunky markup language to actually do much in. Luckily, I was able to procure a server and switch away from GitHub pages to something entirely under my control.

This means I can now just drop a .md file into a directory somewhere and it will automagically become a blog post!

I did run into some weirdness with this - markdown-blog requires .htaccess stuff. This means it works properly with Apache but not nginx. To get around this I had to learn how to translate a .htaccess file to something nginx speaks (and learn what htaccess is in the first place). Unfortunately it seems that Parsedown cannot handle escaping the block of config that I needed to add, otherwise I would share...