For the past five or so years, I’ve meandered back and forth between various site generators: Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, and most recently, Jigsaw. It has been an exercise in tedium keeping the website up-to-date and wrestling with whatever template or starter kit I had used, and honestly, I simply cannot be bothered with it at all anymore.
I know many of you will argue that it couldn’t be simpler than editing text in Markdown and committing it to a repository, and you’d be right. I’m well aware of headless WordPress and countless other CMS systems available to be used with static site generators.
Regardless, I noticed that my blogging over the last few years dried up since migrating away from a traditional WordPress-based website, or when the site was hosted on Hashnode, which behaved in much the same way – WYSIWYG word processing that was more conducive to my way of thinking.
I’m sure many people will disagree and that’s fine. Some developers parrot the same talking points on X about the need for an over-the-top portfolio and stunningly designed website. I’d rather keep things simple – an out-of-the-box template that just works and let my writing and projects do the rest. Nobody’s hiring me based on my ability to style a static website or blog.
After all, if something’s tedious or cumbersome for me to work with, I just won’t bother. If I have to faff around with configuration files and post-generation hooks to build out functionality, I’ll just go build the stuff that I want to focus on instead. This lets me do both.
I’ve been indefatigable in improving my reading intake this year and subsequently want to spend the remaining quarter of the year writing more frequently as the ideal counterpart for that behaviour; aiming for a piece of writing on something I’ve encountered or worked with at least once a week.
Until then, thanks for visiting!