Published on 2017-05-05
Every time I think I've found a suitable means of running my blog (e.g. Hugo, Ghost, etc), I end up reading or reviewing something else compelling enough to warrant implementation.
I'm an optimizer by trade and by desire -- I love efficiency and get a thrill out of playing the bicycle-riding hippie to everyone else's SUV-driver. When it comes to this blog, I've been looking for the simple, easy, and fast implementation that also delivers just what I want to me (and any incidental readers -- Thank you!). Since I started moving to a Chromebook, I've had to rule out local static site generators like Hugo and Pelican, and because I want to use my own domain with TLS certificates (particularly those from Let's Encrypt) and the latest HTTP2 technology, I have to run my own server with software like Caddy.
Practically everyone I know swears by Markdown format (which requires a parser/generator to create the real HTML) but it looked easy. Even the uncool Enterprise kids were doing it, and so I tried it. The hard part was that I knew HTML already and ended up googling syntax more than I wanted, and nothing ever came out 100% as I imagined it would in my head.
Fast-forward a couple of years. About a month ago, I read this talk by Maciej Cegłowski. This was it -- I had found my answer, and it was "roll up your sleeves and get to work."
Much like my use of Golang, Perl, and Linux, I'm a fan of anything you can produce or make better with mere effort. In this case, writing HTML was a little work, but it got me exactly what I wanted.