Reckoning with myself

I think I’m throwing in the towel. Not completely giving up on having a website. I still want to have one and I want to write on it and I want it to be hosted on my machine and I want it to be my home online.

I’m done building it all myself with no assistance.

The experiment with the static TK-web.quest has been interesting and successful. I’ve learned a lot about the web and developing a website. However, I haven’t been writing for the site and I haven’t been spending time developing it. For several months, it has languished. I don’t feel like I have to be writing the website all the time. That’s not it. I feel like in order to write more, I want the website to be just right and my knowledge and skill just isn’t enough to make it happen.

There’s no specific breaking point that completely destroyed my interest in continuing the work in the same manner I have been, but there comes a point in many projects where someone asks “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” In this case, the person asking that question was me, frustrated after trying for several hours to learn how to write a proper render hook for the images on my site. Hugo, which is the tool that builds my site, uses Go for its templating language. Go is fast to build. Hugo is very snappy. But the problem is that I can’t fucking read this shit. I cannot look at the partials and understand what is going on. I’m not a code smith by trade and by no means should reading code come as naturally to me as it should to anyone who does development with more regularity and passion than I do, but I should be able to puzzle out 40 lines in two hours and I just couldn’t.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I still really like writing blog posts in Markdown and I just added Decap CMS to my site to allow me to write from anywhere, even if I don’t have git access. But I’ve dug through the Hugo themes that are out there and there just isn’t a ton of movement in that space. I basically have to use a well-developed and continually supported theme because Hugo has gone through enough changes that older themes just don’t work right without going in and tinkering significantly with them. Something that we already know I can’t really do given my abhorrence of Go. Plus, my site is broken and fragmented enough that I will want to do significant restructuring anyway just to make things work. So, if I’m going to burn it all down and rebuild from scratch, now’s a pretty good time to do it.

Enter 11ty. 11ty is another Static Site Generator. Not as venerable as Hugo, but still very actively developed with a strong community of people working both in the tool making their own sites and also working on components for the project like plugins or themes, what 11ty calls starters. Cassie moved to 11ty not too long ago and seems to have enjoyed the move, though she is certainly more skilled than I am with the whole templating and coding business.

In the end I’m not 100% sure where I’ll land and it will take some experimenting, but my explicit goal is to have a very solid foundation that works from the jump. I can do all the tinkering I like after that is settled. So, expect this space to change. Nothing anyone else relies upon like links and the webring will break, but RSS feeds might surface a bit differently. In any case, I’ll be sharing more as it happens.