At sometime in their lives, geeks want something simple. Something that just works. Something that you can just use and forget about.
For me, many years ago, it was Dropbox. A system which does one thing really, really easily. It shares files around. Nothing fancy. Anything you put in one directory ends up copied to other computers. Is it expensive? No, not really. Do I need all the bells and whistles? No. I just want to copy files.
So i use the free version. Back in the day, I invited a few more people, and a couple of aliases to sign up to get a little extra space. So now I have a few gig of shared drivespace.
Not only that, but as a member of the Committee for my local Allotment Society, they also use it to share important files around. It just works.
And then in 2011 along came Droppages. The premise was simple. Write your website using markdown files give it a template, and it will produce a whole website for you. Directories. Public files. Make a change on your markdown files, and in a few minutes it'll update the site.
Again i used the free version which was limited to a maximum size of 50Mb for the total website and only two domain names under the droppages.com structure. No worries. Didn't need more that that anyway. And so it continued for a long time. And then at the end of 2025, Droppages said they were going to cancel the whole thing. Free sites were limited to only 2 weeks of usage and only paid services allowed. Not only that but they changed the whole underlying system which meant that all of the embedded commands that was used previously were no longer valid. So my sites died.
But I'm a software geek. So I decided to write my own and with this new fangled AI thing flying around, how hard could it be? Turns out, extremely hard. I had so many issues with the AI (Co-Pilot) that I gave up in disgust. AI cannot program its way out of a paper bag for complicated stuff. Maybe it's just Co-Pilot, but the code it produce crashed, even though I gave it debugger output it just screwed itself further into the ground on a simple C program. So I gave up and wrote it myself in Bash.
I matched the existing structure and commands that the original Droppages site used. Admittedly there were few commands used there, but I like the way it ordered directories and files by using preceding numbers, but omitted the numbers in the final output. I also like the use of starting a file or directory with an underscore to hide it, but still have it output the contents.
But there were some limitations. Most notably you could not include additional common templates. Couldn't get the names of files previous or next in the list. Couldn't get a full digest of entries to include in a common index. So I added those extra features. Also i wanted the ability to have a multitude of "websites" to be housed under a common site, so I added a base directory option.
So now my old gloomhaven.droppages.com site has now moved to https://www.kizar.co.uk/Gloomhaven using my new site builder.
And I suppose at sometime I really ought to get round to playing more Gloomhaven and continuing the story. But in the meantime, if you need a simple static site builder, enjoy.
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