During these past few weeks, some blogposts have popped up in my feed, where they are constantly switching blogging platforms, changing their note-taking systems, or similar.
Honestly, more power to you, it is absolutely fine to be interested in trying new things, start something from scratch or turning everything upside down, just because you can.
Or, you know, maybe don’t?
I should mention this post was inspired by Ava who wrote a great article about just sticking with what you already have, so go give it a read! I think it helped me form some of the thoughts I share here.
As for me, well, I am always a work in progress, I guess. While stagnating forever is not ideal in many situations, there are some things where it’s perfectly fine to not try to fix what isn’t broken.
I’ve been only blogging for a little more than four years now, since I started in 2021. It’s not much compared to those who’ve been doing it for literal decades, but it’s not nothing either.
So far, I’ve managed to be happy with what I have. Jekyll to generate my site, Neovim to edit my files, and some shellscripts to automate stuff have been plenty for my needs.
Jekyll is one of the more traditional static site generators around, popularized because of its integration with GitHub pages and other hosting services, and because it’s simply really good at what it does.
It’s not the only option of course, and people adopt and switch around from one place to another. There are other SSGs like Hugo, Eleventy, Pelican, or Zola, and even CMS software like Kirby. There are also blogging platforms that take away the hosting and maintenance and let you just write, such as Bearblog, Pika or Pagecord, for example.
Despite everything, I’m still really satisfied with what Jekyll offers me. It has been a gratifying journey where I’ve created plenty of bash scripts, templates, key bindings, liquid snippets and even plugins to organize stuff exactly how I want it to. And once it was all setup, my blogging workflow has remained virtually unchanged, only with some small additions here and there.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been some hiccups here and there, when it comes to installing Ruby and running Jekyll locally, and when dealing with the Jekyll or Ruby version not matching the one set in the hosting service I use—it was usually my fault to be honest.
In the end, it’s still all leading to the same result. A static website built by uploading files to a GitHub repository.
If anything, some of my automation scripts are less used nowadays, because I have been editing my posts from my phone instead of my laptop, so all my fancy flourishes get skipped, but hey, the post gets published and that’s good enough for me.
I’ve felt the urge to switch things up from time to time, but if I ever feel that boredom creeping in, I am more than satisfied by creating a new website theme, cleaning up my existing stylesheet, or adding new pages. I think the moment I want to do something that cannot be achieved with Jekyll’s feature-set or a bash script, will be when I finally try something else, but that bar has not been reached so far, to be honest.
So, yeah, I think that the fun for me is in a couple things:
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Just writing! - When everything is fine and good, I can just dedicate myself to writing, it doesn’t matter if it’s in my phone, or my own laptop with my fancy setup, or some other computer device, as long as I just write Markdown I don’t really care that much. Just publish the post to my website and trust I didn’t mess up a link or something. I can always fix it later anyway.
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Working within limitations. - I have managed to achieve everything I’ve wanted thus far with my website. And sure there are things I haven’t bothered to try yet, like a search bar or a guestbook page. But I know there are ways to get them, I just need to take the time to set everything up, or not! It is my website after all.
In my experience, that’s what everything boils down to. Everyone sets their own bar wherever they want. Some find it easy to move to something else as soon as things get boring, or too difficult. Others just want to try new things, like how a Linux user keeps distro-hopping for years only to end up on Debian (or maybe Arch) in the end. And others, are up to the challenge, and are willing to stick with their choice and get familiar with it.
Obviously, there are some legitimate reasons to change platforms. Right now I’m pretty annoyed by the fact that my site is still primarily hosted on GitHub. I know of Codeberg and some other alternatives, but I haven’t gotten around to making the change, and I am not sure if Vercel, my current hosting provider even supports building my site from something other than GitHub.
In the end, I’ve been happy with my setup for many years, for the most part, and I barely have to think about it nowadays, I’m just focusing on creating new pages and redesigning existing stuff, but I have no urge to do any drastic changes. I actually kind of dread it, given the amount of templates/plugins/features that for better or worse lock me down to Jekyll, but at the same time, if it’s not an issue, I don’t need to worry about it!
We’ll see how everything goes.
