Omitting .html

The simplest static servers map URL paths directly to file names: since HTML files have names ending in .html, the URLs must also end in .html. This is not especially beautiful, and is arguably useless clutter.

Most static servers can be configured to allow the .html suffix to be omitted, and as it happens, Neocities is already configured this way, and furthermore as it redirects to the non-.html URL, which means using the .html suffix in internal hrefs will lead to a pointless redirect. So it would be nice to be able to configure Mismiy to generate pages with these slightly shorter URLs.

GitHub pages are also configured this way by default.

Configuring Nginx to make file suffix unnecessary

Nginx is a web server (amongst other things) that can be easily configured to handle a static site with implied .html.

server {
    …
    root /var/www/mismiy;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri.html =404;
        …
    }
}

The interesting part is the expression $uri.html in the list of files to try. A path like /2024-05-05-first will map on to the file name /var/www/mismiy/2024-05-05-first.html.

Supporting shorter URLs in Mismiy

To make the generated files use the shorter URLs, add the new --omit-dot-html flag to the mismiy command, as in

mismiy posts pages --omit-dot-html

If you are using the Python module http.server to preview the site then this will create pages whose links do not work; you will want to use the new option when generating the version of the site for uploading.