Doing Things the Hard Way

Written by Joel Dare - September 13, 2025

Instead of running brew install lynx I created a Dockerfile, fired up Alpine in a container, installed Lynx, and started the container to test my website.

It started with a simple email, where someone mentioned it would be nice to build a website that works in Lynx, a text-based web browser.

I use a minimal framework, that I built, called Neat CSS to create most of my projects.

I decided to try my own website, this one, to see how it worked in Lynx. I thought it would work fine, but I had never tried it.

So, I built the docker container, launched it, and tried the site.

When I responded to that user, I let them know how I had tested it and that worked fine. They responded, “I just ran brew install lynx.”

Good point.

I’m always talking about minimalism, yet I often over-complicated projects. Why?

In this case, I think it’s because I already had Docker on my mind and I wanted to do another quick experiment with it.

I also didn’t want to install something on my machine that I wasn’t going to leave. Now, a simple brew uninstall would get rid of it just as quickly, but I have PTSD from sytems that leave things around when you do that.

I also need to keep my Docker skills sharp and it was pretty simple to do for this. I have boiler installed so creating the Dockerfile was a one-line command plus inserting an apk add lynx line and running the whole thing.

So, I like to strive for simplicity, but I have a tenancy to over-engineer things. That’s okay. If I’m releasing something for others I’ll try to iterate until my work is minimal.