Welcome to My Blog!

Published January 7, 2026.

Judging by the date, clearly a Ukrainian Christmas gift to the World Wide Web. 😛

John Chase Blog has begun as a small personal coding project, built for substance over style.

It exists to host whatever random content I feel like publishing to the World Wide Web. 🌎 (If you think that term is "old school", let me assure you that I am up to speed on the Information Superhighway. 🧐)

The blog is mainly composed of static HTML pages that have been generated from Markdown files on my PC by a PHP CLI script that I wrote. (We tend to automatically think of PHP as the language that powers dynamic content on webservers, but it's also highly capable for scripting on your local machine!)

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which surprisingly allows static websites to be deployed even on their Free plan, within generous file quantity & size limits.

I suspect that the tremendous capability of networks like Cloudflare to serve cached assets is one of the reasons why we have seen a resurgence of "static website generator" software tools. It's humorous to remember that back in the late 1990s to early 2000s, this is essentially what popular applications like Microsoft FrontPage did, before dynamic shared web hosting was cheap and plentiful!

Several of the modern projects seem thoroughly capable. However, my requirements for this blog were so simple that I decided to make my own static site generator tool, rather than learn how to operate someone else's Swiss Army knife.

The About page is likely to have the most current technical details.

Testing

Since a blog without posts is no blog at all, this initial entry serves as my test/demo post for the system.

There is nothing down here except some example code.

For example: example code

Heading 3

Yes, that's a subheading. How exciting!

An unordered list:

Queen
Jack
Ace
King

Let's try an ordered list:

Kirk
Picard

Heading 4

This page not only confirms that Markdown to HTML conversion is working, but allows me to test other features as well.

For example, I can type code blocks like this, and they should get highlighted with fancy colours:

<?php
    echo 'Hello world!';
?>

With automatic detection of, and support for, all of the finest languages:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10

A little button to copy the code should also appear when you hover your mouse cursor over the block.

Cool! 😎

Heading 5

Why are you still reading this? 🧐

Heading 6

And who actually needs 6 levels of headings!? 🤷‍♂️