01 HTML/CSS Experiment

The first blog experiment uses plain HTML and CSS. Its purpose is to make the basic mechanics visible before adding a static site generator or build tool.

What Worked

• Each page is easy to open directly in a browser.
• Relative links, images, page structure, and CSS are visible instead of hidden behind tooling.
• The Pythonland bundle shows how a multi-page topic can live in one folder with one shared stylesheet.
• Metadata comments at the top of HTML files give the project a simple way to describe posts before a formal content system exists.

Pain Points

• Navigation has to be updated by hand on every page.
• Shared layout patterns are duplicated across files.
• Manual HTML can drift away from any Markdown source that may exist later.
• Indexes, archives, tags, and next/previous links are all manual.

Next Steps

• Keep the HTML/CSS folder as a preserved experiment under experiments/01-html-css/.
• Use this note as the durable lab record for the workflow.
• Move future reader-facing source posts toward content/posts/ when they are written in Markdown.
• Compare this manual workflow against the Pelican experiment before choosing what belongs in the public site.