Make it easy for yourself
2020-01-18
I’ve had a couple blogs before, but none of them really stuck. I’ve never liked the interface, and they usually had way too many bells and whistles for my taste. Usually, extra features comes at the expense of performance, size, ease-of-use, and security. These are all things I like to have.
This blog runs on a setup I made called writ. For the navbar, it lists out all the markdown files in a given folder. When a reader opens one, it renders the markdown serverside, and styles it clientside. That’s it. If you want to make a new post, you just write a new markdown file. No "publishing", no drafts, no WYSIWYG, no "visual editor", screw all that. Just write markdown. I personally keep all my files available via a webdav server, so i can write posts on my phone, or any computer, if I feel like it.
But building something is so hard
There’s a relevant xkcd about saving your own time, which i think reinforces the point.
Running some bulky CMS system takes time, it forces you into fighting with it, managing it, ticking boxes you didn’t know you needed, and administrating features you will never use. To say nothing of how much it limits what you create based on what your CMS supports. Just because the capital investment is lower doesn’t mean the total cost to operate is lower.
Past that, time isn’t the only thing you have to worry about. Fighting with these systems can be stressful. When you can’t express what you wanted to, or you can’t get the formatting the way you want it, or you have to fight to get something to even appear at all - that’s not free. It costs you. Quantifying stress is much harder than hours, but I’d argue that it’s better for your mental health to do three different tasks that you’re comfortable with, rather than one task that frustrates you. We’ve all had days where we’re "in the zone", where everything clicks and you knock out one thing after another - that happens less often the more stressed you are. If you remove sources of stress, you’re more likely to be more productive - because you’ll spend less time procrastinating, and be faster at each task because you’re not weighed down by stress and stray thoughts.
So?
The only real purpose of this post was to lay out that it’s better to keep things constrained to what you need. It’s tempting to get a Wordpress, or a joomla, or something else similarly bloated - but it’s best to keep it simple. Do you really need "like" and "tweet" buttons? Are you trying to be a professional blogger? Because there sure aren’t many professional bloggers in the world, and it’s vanishingly unlikely you’ll be one just because you had a set of social media buttons. Do you really need tag systems? Probably not. How about weird formatting, a specific mobile app, or user management? Most things that big blog software does are unnecessary to the goal of publishing what you’re thinking.
So, no matter the endeavor, make it easy for yourself.
