This website has been through so much.
Once upon a time it was all hand coded HTML, CSS, and JS. As I built that out, I essentially built out my own little framework to get things done effectively. That was fun but also pretty inefficient (and tedious) after a while.
Then it became an over-engineered Next/React SSR thing because I kind of just wanted to try out the hot new stack. Personally, I enjoyed very little about brushing up on React after not having used it for some time.
More recently I’ve been playing around with Go and htmx on the side so I figured maybe that would be a cool thing to do. And it was. But again, so much unnecessary work to do…what exactly?
Did I really need to set up a database to store my posts? Oh and also authentication so I could login as a site admin and create a new post? I kind of went down that road for a bit and it was fun but again overkill for what I actually wanted to do.
And that’s what it’s come down to. What do I want from this? If I think about why I’m looking to put this up here at all, it’s pretty simple. I want to write about things and I want this website to be a place for the things I write. That’s it. Going down these paths has complicated the process and really detracted from the whole point of having this space. I’ve learned a lot but I’ve written nothing because I was always using the tools and techniques I was reading about to plan a rebuild of the page.
I’ve now decided to just go with Hugo (kind of the obvious choice for a personal blog in retrospect). The hardest decision to make was what theme to use. Now I just have to start writing.
Here goes.