So… I did it again. I rebuilt my blog from scratch, again. This is (at least) the 4th time I do that.
A long trip
I don’t recall if I started writting at Blogspot and then moved to Blogger, or the other way around. It doesn’t matter, it was a good start, but it sucked.
So I eventually jumped to the much more powerful wordpress.com, and at some
point I felt it wasn’t enough. I wanted to customise my blog even more, and to
get rid of their annoying advertisements.
That’s when I decided to host my own wordpress instance (archived here), and… oh boy.
The maintenance cost was tremendous: updating wordpress, its plugins, the customised theme I created, PHP, Apache (Nginx some time later), the operating system underneath… and yet, that wasn’t enough.
Every now and then a new zero-day bug would come up, and it turns out some ISIS pawns (yep, fucking ISIS, no kidding here) hacked my blog to deface it and place their disgusting propaganda.
So there was I again, looking for alternatives.
Static Sites Generation
I decided to go for static site generation. The appeal was evident, they could be hosted at a much lesser cost, and the attack surface was much smaller too.
Pelican was my 1st choice, but it didn’t cut it. Although not much better, Jekyll was my final choice back then, as it was nicely integrated with Github Pages.
My problem with Pelican & Jekyll, though, is that both of them are a dependencies nightmare because of how much of a disgrace is package management in Python and Ruby ecosystems. And it only gets worse when your computer stops working and you have to configure a new one, or when you have to switch between machines for any other reason.
Besides, keeping track of tooling versions can be a problem too. That’s why, even if I used Zola for some other websites (such as Avatar-CLI’s one) because it’s just a single binary, I wasn’t entirely content with it.
Hi, Astro!
Here we go, I rewrote my blog on top of Astro. I considered using Ink’s theme, which seems nice, but this time I took the opportunity to practice some of my long forgotten & rusty frontend abilities (I copied from it anyway).
And what can I say? so far, it has been awesome. I can easily pin all versions under Git version control, it’s wonderfully integrated with SolidJS, TailwindCSS, and for a static site generation tool, it’s really flexible (like no others I tried before).
There’s a lot I still want to to, leaving aside the clearly improvable style, I want to apply some optimisations to CSS, JS, & fonts; configuring the RSS & sitemap generation… but I also have other experiments in mind, like integrating Lyra to statically index the site’s content.
So, I’m leaving it here for today, I’m looking forward to write about all that stuff!