Site's technical specifications
URL parameter
| Parameter | Value(s) | Default value | Description | Control exemple | Scope/status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| lang |
|
en | Sets current page's and navigation's language. If content is not available in selected language, the site will adapt, usually displaying content in available language, but also keeping selected language when navigating. |
 |
Works everywhere accross the site. |
| style |
|
minimalistic-white | Set current page's and navigation's style. |  |
|
| key | (Context-dependent) | (Context-dependent) | Selects an item in contexts allowing item selection. In example, page including a data set view and a single item view. | (Context-dependent) | See "Description". |
| page | [Integer numbers] | 1 | (Pagination is not implemented anywhere yet (2022-03-14).) | See "Description". |
Purpose
This site was initiated around 2010 with no pretension other than being a more or less stable "web 1.x" casual communication/sharing support, providing me some degree of independence from "proprietary" content platforms. It can be seen as a derivative from "personal websites" from the 1990s but based on more recent tools.
Dependencies (non-exhaustive)
For this "project", I try to restrain multiplication of dependencies if I can do things myself. Or I try to reduce their scopes. I have seen various tools about which, at some point, it was considered that "Everyone should use that!" and a few years later "No one should use that anymore!"... I usually pick stability over the hype there. This site is 11 years old (2022-03-14) and so far I'm rather satisfied with this approach. Having files written approximately 10 years ago that I haven't had to modify for years and are just there doing their job makes things feel "old and powerful" (but there is always stuff to do at the same time, in a sense it feels a bit like the Millenium Falcon). It is also an occasion to try or experiment various approaches. One attention point is of course to find a right balance between "reinventing the wheel" and long-term relying on a "wheel that someone else has built". As far as I can remember, my biggest headache was switching from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5... Changes were discreet but subtile (and "maybe" I had put too much customisation on Bootstrap 4's Cards).
Edit: Now that I am learning Angular 2+ (16), I release that my "homemade" framework has a lot of common points in it philosophy with that kind of modern frameworks... There are significant differences though, like: it acts on both backend and frontend (it is a PHP framework with JavaScript parts, not a JavaScript framework), it manages standard URLs rather than routes, it is not in a "distributable" state and is not intented for it...
I chose PHP because, in that time, for this language, it was easier to find a cheap hosting where you just uploaded files without other worries. The offer choice is wider now. Secondly, I wanted to try something different than what I was already using professionally.
Frontend
Bootstrap, Font Awesome 5, DataTables.
And jQuery... Here is a perfect example of a tool that I thought would never go away completely and is now widely considered "obsolete" (although I perceived some hints when some frameworks, like Angular I think, started overlapping/replacing it's use cases). It think that DataTables still relies on it (I should check this) and I still have a few custom functions that use it (2022-03-14), but I'm not in much hurry about removing it completely.)
Backend
Undisclosed, but mostly homemade framework.
Credits
Many pages have a "Credits" link in their footer. This links to a page with credits to the authors of resources I used. Each credit page can be about a section or a page. I usually do not remove credits even if I do not use some resource anymore, hence there may be credits for resources that don't appear anywhere on the site anymore.
Thumbnails on menu-type pages vs pages/sections contents
Not all pages/sections on the site have the same "quantity" and "nature" of content. Hence, sometimes the thumnails used on menu-type pages can raise somewhat more expections that the corresponding pages/sections should. I am aware of this. This is because I try to make the menu-type pages look nice, and I don't want to downgrade their looks. I don't see this as a major issue on a low-audience website, so at the time of writing (2022-03-29) I don't want to change this.
Site map
Site map has has a page on it's own: https://thomasconte.net/sitemap/?style=none
Low third party scripts contents
(Most websites that you visit "daily" will simply not warn you about these and often use hundreds of them.)
I usually do not include third party site's scripts in the building of this website. So if you ever see a logo and a link to some other (big?) web sites, they do not include any third party scripts running in the background, they're made of local (and usually static) code.
At the time I'm updating this paragraph though (2023-01-29), there are three exceptions: pages with video galleries include YouTube's embedded players (usually after a click) and donation pages include a PayPal pixel (which I don't think can be removed without breaking the form) and a form which redirect to PayPal's backend, and Amazon-generater banners (in affiliated linked).