Dear Reader,
I'm afraid to inform you that I am building a blog. I just want something simple that has everything I want and is easy to maintain. I know you're going to say to use substack (nazi bar) or medium (lame) or maybe even ghost (based) but that's way too much to maintain for a simple task. Yet six months from now I will have a tangled mess of poorly organized posts strung together with html hyper links.
Surely adding a markdown templating system will be the end of my woes. At least that way I can reuse snippets without copy and pasting or learning html. But wait never mind html what about styling?
Inevitably readers will get tired of staring at this non-dark mode page and want something a little more sophisticated. One of you will suggest hugo or jekyll themes which will prettify my pages but like the default will lack uniqueness and character. Instead I'm just going to use CSS and it's going to look bad until it looks good. It's not very effective but it is unique.
Speaking of a unique experience, what if I tried to make some animations or maybe add a code editor like monaco to some of my posts. I could even add bsky comments or track visitor stats. I could use disqus, codepen, and plausible but I just don't like them and they don't fit this retro-web aesthetic I'm going for.
In the last leg of my journey I'll try to formalize all of my learnings and share it with others as a set of packages and principles others can use to build their blogs.
Dear reader, I am building a blog.