An experimentation in low resource/high capacity publishing
This website is here to explore the technicalities and politics of running a news and information website with the lowest resources and monetary cost.
That is, to develop a system that can deliver a high volume, sustainable and portable website using the fewest resources in terms of web servers, bandwidth, software, and money.
Uses free (as in free speech) software. Uses well maintained software. No artificial restrictions on developing and publishing.
We do not have the financial resources of large corporations, so keeping costs low is an absolute necessity, whilst still delivering a high usage website.
Must be easy, trivial in fact, to move from one web server or service to another. No externally imposed lock-ins to software or services.
No hostages to fortune.
The fundamental thing about what is being built here is that it must be sustainable and portable.
This means that all of the software used must be freely available with no restrictions put on how it may be used on someones computer.
This means free (as in free speech) software. It means no subscriptions, no forced upgrades or other artificially imposed restrictions.
This is linked to portability, since the software must be easy to share, move between computers, and not tied to any hosting platform.
Of course a hosting platform must be used, but portability means that even if all online services are closed down, it would be a technically trivial process to move to a new hosting platform and that development/updating would continue uninterrupted.
A website builder.
Hugo is a static website builder. A static website is one that depends upon no server-side software other than the web server itself. There are no databases, or processing with technologies like PHP.
Web servers are very good at serving static content. In fact they are orders of magnitude better in serving static files than dynamically constructed web pages that use databases and pre-processing. This means that far more page requests and website visitors can be catered for on a given server.
Hugo was decided upon partly because it is a well developed piece of software capable of delivering complex websites, but also because it uses a standalone, single file, executable that does not have any other dependencies other than a standard GNU Linux/Windows/OSX setup. ie. there are no complex frameworks to be installed or maintained.
Hugo is built using the Go programming language and is much faster and uses fewer resources in rendering a website than any other static web builder I have heard of.
Transferring the development and maintenance of a Hugo between computers is also trivial. In fact it is very easy to use several different computers at different times or locations.
A Hugo theme.
After choosing Hugo as a static website generator came the decision about whether to use a pre-developed “theme” or to make one from scratch.
After coming across the Academic theme it seemed clear that it didn’t really make sense to start from scratch.
The Academic theme is actively developed, well documented and flexible. With very little work it can start to be used for the purposes of this website. Its flexibility means that with more work it can fit even closer to the needs of Redclick.info
Given the nature of static websites there are no security considerations with any Hugo theme or any compulsion to “upgrade” to a newer version.
If the Academic theme were to be abandoned by its author/maintainer there would still be no compulsion to change any part of the site maintenance or development.
It would be possible to continue develop the theme for the purposes of Redclick.info without any restrictions since it is free (as in free speech) software.
Version control software.
Building a website with Hugo is akin to writing a piece of software. Though much simpler, like software code it is essentially text files in a file structure.
There is a well trodden and robust path for developing software with file versioning, and shared repositories between multiple programmers. The most popular (and useful in this case) are the so-called distributed version control systems.
Git is the most popular, and well supported, of these distributed version control systems which is why I’ve decided to use it.
Git is an entirely separate system to Hugo. ie. neither depends upon the other. But Git is a very good way of controlling the shared development of a Hugo website and its contents.
This means, of course, that any collaborators in maintaining and editing the website would have to become conversant with Git. There is plenty of advice and online courses teaching the use of Git. It is not overly complex for simple usage and is well worth learning.
About, or relating to developing this website
It looks like a cliche … it is a cliche. Basically, if an element on a web page has no truly useful function, then remove it. A carousel made with Javascript to show images? Get rid of it, it’s a waste of resources. You may think it looks cool, but what is its actual function other than to screw with people’s browsers and internet connexion? Huge background images or videos (especially with parallax type effects)?
There are millions of websites, so why start another? As mentioned elsewhere, this is partly, even mostly, an experiment or rather an exploration into low resources/high availability web publishing. Right now it’s a personal project but I hope that it may help to develop the debate both technically and politically about how we as socialists use the web. When the web was first growing there were masses of adverts which went along the lines “start your own web shop, open 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year worldwide.