Jan Miksovsky

During a week of off-trail #backpacking in Utah's Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument last week, a fellow hiker captured a great shot of me at sunset

My daughter saw it and said, "That looks like a social media profile banner".

Oh, good idea

Last week a parent of a young child was intrigued by the #journal I keep for my family. I wrote up my suggestions to him as a blog post: https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/05-11-journaling

#Journaling as a practice has many benefits. It doesn’t matter how you start, only that you start.

#smallweb #blogging

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Track changes in your site

More about Origami's Dev.changes builtin: https://weborigami.org/builtins/dev/changes
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/track-changes-in-your-site.html

This Origami tool works with any #staticsite generator!

#ssg #smallweb #blogging

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Cache slow resources

More about Origami's Tree.cache builtin: https://weborigami.org/builtins/tree/cache
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/cache-slow-resources.html

#programming #staticsite

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Rewriting nested function calls

More about Origami pipe operator: https://weborigami.org/language/expressions#pipe-operator
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/rewriting-nested-function-calls.html

#staticsite #programming

FWIW there's a (stale?) JS proposal for a pipe operator: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator

It’s a treat to read such a well-written overview of #WebOrigami!

https://vale.rocks/posts/web-origami

I recall that @vale completely got the idea the first time he saw it, and he’s done great things with it ever since.

I think Origami’s the best way to make your site, but don’t just take my word for it — read Vale’s post!

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Group pages

More about Tree.groupBy builtin function: https://weborigami.org/builtins/tree/groupby
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/group-pages.html

#static #staticsite #smallweb

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Serve anything

More about Origami's serve command: https://weborigami.org/builtins/dev/serve
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/serve-anything.html

#static #staticsite #smallweb

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Deferring work

More about Property getters in Origami: https://weborigami.org/language/expressions#property-getters
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/deferring-work.html

#programming #staticsite

This week's #WebOrigami comic: File extensions

More about Working with file types in Origami: https://weborigami.org/language/filetypes
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/file-extensions.html

#programming #templates

Configuration-based site-making tools say: organize your content into folders, edit some config files, then run our tool to get a site.

But what if writing your site from scratch actually involves *less* code?

My 4th and final post in a series comparing a sample blog in #WebOrigami and #Eleventy: **Is code is more concise than configuration?** (Yes! Yes it is! Also easier to follow, more coherent, and more expressive.)

https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/03-20-code-is-more-concise-than-configuration

#coding #programming #blogging #11ty #staticsite

Code is more expressive than configuration: comparing a sample blog in #WebOrigami and #Eleventy

https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/03-19-code-is-more-expressive-than-configuration

Third post of four comparing creating the same #blog in two different #ssg systems. Both require code — which kind of code do you want to write?

#coding #programming #blogging #11ty

Code is more coherent than configuration: comparing a sample blog in #WebOrigami and #Eleventy

https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/03-18-code-is-more-coherent-than-configuration

Second post in a series comparing creating the same #blog in two different #ssg systems, in which we compare approximating your desired site with a folder structure vs describing your desired site in text

#blogging #11ty

Code is easier to follow than configuration: comparing a sample blog in #WebOrigami and #11ty https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/03-17-code-is-easier-to-follow-than-configuration

First post in a series comparing creating the same #blog in two different #ssg systems. The first diagram shows a large number of implicit connections between source files in the #Eleventy blog, the second shows that all connections in the Origami blog are explicit.

#blogging

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Coding in your terminal

More about The ori command-line interface: https://weborigami.org/cli/
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/coding-in-your-terminal.html

Using ori in a VS Code JavaScript Debug Terminal lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, and step through code you start from a terminal!

#javascript #programming

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jimniels/116197448348633013

This is a nice use of #WebOrigami to liberate photos from #Instagram and create a personal #smallweb site!

I was so disappointed when IG deprecated their Basic Display API last year because we can't have nice things, but (for now) they still let users export their own data

Origami is great for this sort of fetch-and-transform task

This week's #WebOrigami comic: What are slugs

More about Origami.slug() function: https://weborigami.org/builtins/origami/slug
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/what-are-slugs.html

Fun etymolgy: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/24/whats-in-a-slug/

#staticsite #indieweb #smallweb #blogging

Who else would use a shared #JavaScript library for #Electron apps to create an deploy #Netlify sites?

https://jan.miksovsky.com/posts/2026/03-05-netlify-dialog-library

#staticsite #ssg

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Maps transform bulk content

More about Tree.map builtin function: https://weborigami.org/builtins/tree/map
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/maps-transform-bulk-content.html

#blogging #static #smallweb

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jimniels/116120996001714316

One of the very best things about developing #WebOrigami as a friendlier dialect of #JavaScript for sites is that, as long as the core language is well-designed, users aren’t confined to a limited, pre-imagined set of features — they can create all sorts of useful solutions for themselves.

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Transform content

More about The Content/Transformation model: https://weborigami.org/model.html
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/transform-content.html

#static #smallweb

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Serve a site

More about Origami serve command: https://weborigami.org/builtins/dev/serve
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/serve-a-site.html

#static #smallweb #devtools #javascript

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Include a folder

More about Site definitions: https://weborigami.org/language/sites
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/include-a-folder.html

#programming #sites

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Template documents

More about Origami template documents: https://weborigami.org/language/templatedocuments
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/template-documents.html

#templates #javascript

This week's #WebOrigami comic: Full-text search

More about Origami's pagefind extension: https://github.com/WebOrigami/extensions/tree/main/pagefind
HTML comic: https://weborigami.org/comics/full-text-search.html

#static #smallweb

The fixation at #GoogleIO last week on AI buried the much more interesting talk by @Una on The Latest in Web UI, which highlighted the ton of interesting features arriving in #HTML and #CSS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-6LgEjEyzE

I wish the other browser vendors didn't rely so heavily on Google to get the word out. They all do so much work to make these features possible, as do the standards committees, the #OpenUI group, and @igalia, and they all deserve to get more credit.

Each month this year I'm trying to post a sample website written in Origami, a declarative programming language at the level of #HTML and #CSS for defining websites.

This month's sample is Aventour Expeditions, a site for an outdoor travel company: https://aventour-expeditions.netlify.app

It's easy to have Origami call other template languages, so for this sample I used the #Handlebars template language to turn markup and data into HTML.

It's useful to be able to apply templates written in a language like #Handlebars to things in the shell.

The Origami #CLI lets you invoke JavaScript functions defined in .js files, but you can now also identify a handler for any file extension — like OS app file associations, but for a CLI. https://weborigami.org/language/filetypes.html#custom-file-types

So a handler can load a `.hbs` file as a function that applies a Handlebars template, then apply that in the command line.