simpler is better

i have struggled to maintain a personal site for years. partly it's because i just don't have a lot to say, but the tooling has always been a sticking point, too.

there's no small number of static site generators out there, all of which claim a frictionless but flexible approach for getting content on the web. and with services like github pages, it's insanely easy to get things down to a markdown file and a push-button deployment. rip to heroku's free tier, btw.

naturally, i've tried a few of these, like jekyll and hugo and hexo and whatever the fuck else; i forget. but my affliction is that i only ever want to use what is strictly necessary, and nothing more. that's why i prefer window managers to full desktop environments, why i run arch (btw), and why i edit in vim. in fact, that ground-up philosophy is also how i prefer to learn new things - start with the basic axioms, and then go from there.

so in lieu of a prefab solution that offers out-of-the-box support for stuff like pagination, themes, rss, tagging, etc., my approach here is to just add those things as i need or want them. that might make some tasks or refactoring more difficult in the long run, but the payoff is that i will always get to relish in the feeling of having total domain over my website and its inner workings.

as of this writing, the setup is pretty spartan: sinatra, thin, erb, and docker. i think i'd like to keep it like that unless it somehow becomes unmanageable.

btw, shoutout to my increasingly adequate website, a site i discovered via the cmus guide posted there, but continue to enjoy for the author's ethos and leftist blog posts. its influence will undoubtedly be felt here.