Being the Change
The internet used to be fun, and everyone had a website. We didn’t funnel our entire online expression through ad-serving analytics-driven sites owned by maniacal billionaires. The internet was more than “four sites, each of which contains only screenshots of the other three.” (Or however the quote goes.)
Google used to just be for finding websites, and not, like, answering every possible question on its own. (Don’t get me started.)
So, this site is now statically-generated. It used to be hosted on Wordpress, which as a content management system, is fine, I guess. It’s just been crufted over with too many features. And honestly, it’s faster for me to type raw HTML than to try and wrangle that crazy block editor.
I thought about Squarespace for a moment, but their hosting plans are more expensive than the “free” I was paying Wordpress. Plus, one more editor, themes, etc.
So this site is generated by a static site generator, by which I mean posts are generated from markdown with a single node.js script that I wrote that just converts the markdown to html, and the rest is updated by an organic site generator: me. Stuff changes here from time to time, but I don’t need a content management system, and I don’t need to deal with the generalities of someone else’s general system.
Which is the problem.
The web is built on general frameworks on top of general frameworks now. For small projects like this, it’s overkill, and the code they generate is seriously bloated.
So.
Until I need more than just a few posts and a few static pages about my creative projects (which move pretty slowly, heh), I’ll just update things manually. Run the node script to generate the posts, and FTP the site to the host.
Just like old times.