lumberjack wharfie is on neocities

4 September 2025

I've been wanting to update my neocities site more, but I just wasn't. And I think a big reason why I wasn't updating it is because I didn't like the workflow, at least not for blogging. I was going the "completely raw html" route, and the clunkiness of manually working with templates and having to propogate changes across all the site's files definitely hindered any inspiration to blog or design or whatever.

But I still wanted to have an entirely HTML-based site, partially due to ignorance regarding using ~frameworks~ for web development and partially due to an I don't need no dang framework, just fucking use html mentality. So I just needed a workflow that I would actually use.

To be clear, do what works for you. If you like a certain framework, have at it.

I came across j3s.sh, specifically their blog post "my website is one binary," and it started me on a journey of figuring out just enough Go to build something similar for my neocities site.

Since I won't be running the binary on the server, I just needed to design a program to build HTML files from some kind of template & content files. I have basically no experience with Go, though, so over the past few days I've learned what I need to make this. It takes an html template and a stylesheet in a "templates" directory and page body content html files in a "content" folder as well as "content/blog". The files in the "blog" subfolder get their own pages and appear in a blog page containing all of the blog posts

So far, it's kinda the minimum viable version. I want to add some more functionality, like

• automatically updating the "last updated" footer
• support for storing images within the same folder structure / parsing files by file type
• uh idk i'm sleepy as i write this

Anyway my thoughts are a lil scrambled right now, but I'll find better ways to write about it and give it a standalone page on here!!

have a good one ~wharf