OK Fine

Fine, I’ll start a blog. Or I should say restart a blog.

I started writing on this site several years ago. I was wanting to write more professional content around my work. I picked Middleman as a build tool for the blog and off I went.

I wrote a few posts on it. Five or six over the course of a couple of years maybe? After some time, I converted the site over to Jekyll because GitHub would build, deploy, and host your site for free. I wrote on it a few times, but I eventually went dark.

Then it happened. I got motivated. I decided to build the entire site myself.

I went through lots of iterations. I wrote a working Django app that supported posts, RSS, and pagination—but I never deployed it. I wrote several Python ones, some I converted the content and deployed, some I didn’t. I think I wrote one in Elixir and another in Racket. I even wrote this weird CRDT thing where I could run a command, open an editor, and save what I wrote to a database where it kept all the history of my posts because I was convinced this would reduce the barrier to writing. (It didn’t)

I counted it up one day. I can’t remember the total, but I know I built more way more static site generators and Django apps than the number of posts I had written.

I think there was the concern of not looking pro for not building my own stuff. Then not looking pro for writing junk posts. Or short posts. Or non-tech posts. Before long I had worried myself into a gridlock.

I recently read this post titled How to Blog. The author wrote:

Once you choose the technology that runs your blog, use it. Don’t replace it, ever. Never ever rewrite it. If you’re trying to blog, write.

Oops. That’s my bad.

So I’m giving this another shot with something off the shelf. If I get past five posts in the next couple of months I’ll consider it a success.