Difficult to answer this question in a comprehensive manner, since there are so many potential caveats.
And I’m in too much of a hurry to write and test code at the moment, so I’ll just go for the hand wave:
Use a relative width for responsiveness, and add a min-width.
That’s the simplest possible answer I can think of.
Things do get complicated if you want to serve different image sizes for different device types, etc. but that doesn’t sound like the type of concern a personal blogger is likely to have?
zebra
122
yes, it’s a very stupid question sorry to distract from more interesting things.
a kind person just PMd me the solution
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I don’t think it’s a stupid question at all.
I think it’s a great illustration of how CSS can be either very simple (couple of lines to get what you want in a very direct way) to extremely complex (re-usable component abstractions that allow for design at scale in large corporations).
This spectrum makes it very difficult for newcomers (or old hands trying to remember stuff) because the web is littered with info all along the entire spectrum (and very little labeling indicating who the intended audience may be). And little to none of this info tends to be oriented towards the “indie” type who “just wants a web site”.
Honestly, I have the same criticism of a lot of the #indieweb technologies. For all their supposed “indie” audience, I feel they continue to pull in way too much complexity inherited from corporate concerns.
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zebra
125
yes most of my frustration is that everything i remember about CSS i learned in the 90’s and it’s all wrong now, and there are too many resources.
since there’s so many people here who are good at front-end layout / design, maybe a “stupid questions” thread would be great for people like me who suck at it and just need to make something usable every few years
anyways, i wonder about “collaborative text.” i obviously like it (i post things here) but i also kind of want to subvert it all the time (i delete things here.)
i’m interested, in an aspirational way, to try and do things (writing) in a more persistent and long-form format. just dunno if that needs a “platform.” maybe there is something in between a “platform” and just “some stuff”
my favorite people writing seem to be on Blogspot!
can this possibly really be a property of a platform?
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I’d be happy with a CSS question thread 
Even though I have a front-end day job these simple questions are still a good exercise
There’s so many things to remember in CSS, no question is truly stupid. (there was a website dedicated to “how to center image in css” a while ago :o )
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I think it’s also a symptom of most any UI related interface/API. (MFC, WPF, Qt, Swing, HOOPS…)
As in, it’s designed to be easy for general use cases but reality is made of specifics, and inevitably you have to use all kinds of stupid hacks to get a thing to line up with another thing, resize the right way, make scrollbars work right, move the camera where it needs to go, scale a font to fit in the available space, still look right on Chinese installs of Windows, etc. And 80% of UI development time is fixing all those annoying edge cases.
Often, the simpler the API tries to make things, the harder they actually are …
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1993 era HTML sidesteps all of this by diminishing the emphasis on aesthetics. Sometimes there is something to be said for that approach.
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Somehow I knew at the time that there was something magical about those conversations that I’d never be able to repeat later in life. I was absolutely right about that.
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bgc
132
I guess it’s a force of habit, to dl source and build…
The correct answer to a lot of old hacky old HTML/CSS layout problems is now: CSS grid and CSS flexbox. There is a learning curve, but they maybe got it mostly right this time.
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Wordpress.com is pretty good. It’s free if you don’t mind having Wordpress in the url. They have great analytics built in.
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Ben
135
To bring together what @ht73 and I were discussing and the stated purpose of this thread, has anyone here considered WriteFreely and/or write.as? It’s a federated blogging platform that publishes using ActivityPub to interconnect bloggers of many sorts who write about a variety of topics.
On the topic of flexible CSS without frameworks, @mdoudoroff is absolutely correct - CSS grid and CSS flexbox do have some unexpected behaviour (like all CSS), but they essentially pull the responsive grid functionality of Bootstrap into CSS proper, which is fantastic for web developers who want to keep everything lightweight and avoid using too many external libraries…
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zebra
137
no, i gotcha…
i mean that (maybe?) in many respects (not all?) the quality of discussion is is not contingent on the platform; i’ve had similar experiences in the heyday of various BBSs or even listserves. (lines reminds me of a BBS more than anything.)
the biggest / weirdest novel feature being the ability to edit / delete / change. which i am obsessed with. that’s something you can also have when each person hosts their own content.
IOW, seems like there are meanings of “platform” beyond the technical or even socioeconomic (?)
(this really is question, not statement)
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there’s blogging, and there’s conversation. the holy grail is that the two overlap, or at least intersect… I have my doubts that there’s a single-platform, or even technical, solution, that enables both, well. we’re all “here”, but, we’re not. physical distance is (still, perhaps, always?) key.
in terms of the specific Q, all the blogs I’ve started or contributed to have been/are wordpress, which I still use. I briefly tried medium, but I found it mediumizes the content into a relatively shallow clickbaity space, to say nothing of the feature austerity.
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LLK
139
I dream of an internet where anywhere you’d post there would be a button “auto-delete in xxx (select the number) hours” or “Post and delete whenever”, I really have a love / hate relationship with so much of our daily conversations being archived, stored, in some way (meaning : for all to see, like here, or for big corps to see even if we can’t see it anymore, like Facebook and probably a lot of others).
julio
140
My favorite light CSS framework is
http://getskeleton.com
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I got curious how this approach avoids issues with spam, and was pleased to find this:
#indieweb is definitely worth exploring, but I do so dearly wish it wasn’t so fond of its own jargon. It makes the whole scene fairly impenetrable. I know I’ve been banging on about this, but I really want to see the movement take accessibility more seriously, and I’m not talking about physical disabilities. I’m talking about the barrier to entry that comes from needing to learn about new technologies before being able to make use of them.
Part of what makes corporate social media so popular is ease of use. A child can sign up for a Facebook account. A child can even figure out that they’re supposed to check “yes” when the site asks if they’re over 13 (even if they aren’t).
Let’s make the weird web “child’s play”, in terms of ease of use. Please?
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That’s why I wish the #indieweb would get more focused on the content of what’s being published (elevating, amplifying it) and less on the coder navel gazing.
I’m sounding pretty harsh. That’s kind of intentional.
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I’d actually be fine if the web was little more than bare links to zines like this one:
h/t to @iain for the link.
Most people are capable of producing a nice PDF these days, even if the intricacies of CSS are beyond them.
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