Blogging vs. Blog Setups (rakhim.org)

Damn this hit me hard, why do I blog so much about migrating old PHP websites to static site generators.

where are the livejournal users?

This really hit me — I spent a long time (several iterations) designing my perfect blogging static site generator, and wrote a few posts about my journey of creating the tool. After those few posts, I’ve had lots of ideas for new ones but haven’t pushed any to completion.

So I mostly just have a blog about creating the static site generator used to generate the blog...

When people say "tools don't matter" what they really mean is that the "from 2004" part matters a lot more than the "WordPress setup" part.

That doesn't mean that static site generators aren't better though, and I'm sure we'll see more and more high volume blogs that are built in SSGs soon.

With web dev and marketing — and probably in many other areas — there is something equivalent of productivity porn that I don’t know what to call. It manifests in lengthy discussions with multiple stakeholders, endless iterations, and many thousands spent on tools that in the end mean nothing on their own. Like, cool, you shaved half a millisecond off your build time and your smartfridge sounds a ding at every successful deploy... What has that done for the bottom line?

I feel personally attacked.

static site generators are nothing more than manually triggered cache refreshes.

Hahahaha and here I'am, writing my own static site generator this weekend. I promise I'll use it to write more!

I feel called out as an org mode fan.

I switched from WordPress to Craft, both on my personal website, and the one that pays the rent.

Working with Craft is a lot more pleasant, but I spent so much time working on things that Wordpress has many plugins for. I also spent a lot of time fighting with Redactor, the WYSIWYG editor that often messes up the "WYG" part. I still have to clear the cache manually using the command line. I'm used to this workflow, but I'm not sure I could teach another editor to use it.

Mission accomplished!

I'm the counter example. I made a medium blog purposely to stop myself falling into this trap but then I didn't consider any of the articles "finished" enough and never posted them.

And here I was thinking I'm the only weirdo writing raw HTML.

At least some people even write about their generators.

There’s a lot of people who build static site generators and never even write a post.

That's a nice web comic, I clicked through the (short) back catalog!

In fact, I felt so "at home at xkcd" that I kept hovering my mouse over the images for a second punchline. :D

I guess I'm unusual in writing a static blog generator in 2005, writing a very short blog post about it (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2005-09-12-blogsh.html) and barely touching the code since.

For those who don’t know, check out the whole series of comics by Rakhim. They’re pretty good! :-D

This is hilarious because I’m currently converting my own blog engine (https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy, which powers https://taoofmac.com) to a static site generator, and have decided to port it to Rust sometime in the future.

Which is why I'll hand-write HTML until I have more than a handful of posts.

This whole comic is really good!

I find it interesting that all the "write content, not about your blogging platform" examples are old tools.

I wrote more than 500 posts on my current blog[1], and much more on other blogs I've had. The first advice I give to anyone who wants to blog is to just use wordpress, don't focus on the presentation, just on the content. Once you're like 10 blog posts in, then feel free to move the content elsewhere, but not before. Anything that prevents you from writing content is friction at this point.

Other advice I also give: write short posts and write unfinished posts. If you wanted to write perfect 10/10 content again and again, you should write a book instead. A blog is about low friction to write. People are interested in your thoughts, get them out there.

[1]: https://cryptologie.net/

I had to accept the only way I would blog consistently is with one of the severely feature-limited managed plans from Automattic to keep me from tinkering. 18,000 words later, the system seems to work.

https://kyefox.com/

Yep. Wordpress is desperately uncool, you will be using a tool old enough to vote, you will be using old, proven technologies, but it fucking works and once you have set up your blog you can just keep coming back to it and actually making posts about whatever you want to share with the world, instead of abandoning it, then coming back a while later to check out a new blog setup built on whatever this month's hot language/framework is.

And you can get plugins to make that Wordpress blog auto-post to whatever the hell people use nowadays. Own your own data, be immune to having it all vanish when something happens to your account on Hot Social Site, or to the entire site.

I write less on my site(1) than I used to, twitter/mastodon has eaten a lot of that energy, but it is still where I go for anything lengthy, and it is still where I post my big comics projects.

1: http://egypt.urnash.com

I’m the exception to the rule — I wrote my own blogging software to power this site https://psalm.dev/articles but haven’t written about it.

Because it’s very boring! Basically just a souped-up markdown renderer that uses GitHub’s API for some draft functionality. I’ve spent maybe four hours building it in total. I’ve spent much longer writing individual posts.