phil@dler

New Year, New Blog

A few years ago I started this website, and writing blog entries. The original intention had been to keep it as a pet project without additional software bloat, no frameworks and no onerous software to manage it. It is, after all, a personal site kept for and by a lone individual.

Fast forward, and after one too many html entity mistakes, finding it tedious to generate heading images for each blog entry, manually coordinating links between the home page and the blog pages, not to mention the absence of sensible groupings like series and tags, not to mention a busy personal life, maintaining the blog kind of fell by the wayside.

I also tumbled down a seemingly endless rabbit hole about markup languages, trying through too many over-complicated methods to build a system that would allow me to manage a static html blog without the need for a bunch of framework code, or worse, using something like wordpress (more on my aversion to wordpress in another post).

I’m finally back to it after all this time, with a new approach (but almost no new tooling), and some lessons learned about writing overcomplicated solutions where changing a mental model can yield faster, easier to maintain results (another future post).

Of course, times change, and the content I would choose to have on my blog has changed as I’ve gotten a bit older and a bit more circumspect, as such, I’ve also gone through my existing blog posts and rooted out anything which is divisive and inflammatory, and will be sticking to the professionally relevant or at least largely factual.

I won’t be doing a future blog post on the why of that.

This means that my existing content is now somewhat thinner than it was, but hopefully, that will change over the coming year.