HiWS — Hiswill Web Stack

HiWS — Hiswill Web Stack — is the umbrella site for the free web projects and tools I build and give away. It started in 2022 as a folder of small utilities and grew into one front door for all of them.

What it does

• Shows the projects and tools in one catalogue, with a page for each.
• Hosts the Bible reader and the collection of small browser tools.
• Explains who is behind the site, how to get in touch, and carries the disclaimer, privacy and terms pages a public service needs.

How it is built

• Plain procedural PHP 8.3+ with MySQLi prepared statements — no framework, no Composer, no build step.
• Bootstrap 5.3.3 and Font Awesome 6.5.2 vendored in the repo, re-skinned through CSS variables instead of new components.
• nginx and php-fpm serving the tree directly, with MariaDB holding the content.
• Every page starts from one init file that loads the config, the connection, the helpers and the queries, so the page itself is only markup.

What I learned

• Writing a small, honest architecture: one settings file, one connection, one place for every query.
• Getting out of the router's way — short addresses, no framework, no magic.