Creating a blog

The idea of creating a blog has been on my mind for some time, but two things have so far delayed me in creating one.

The first is that I don't quite know what I'd do with a blog. I have a feeling that the constant stream of stimulation and flashing lights into my brain has over time dulled my ability to properly conceive of thoughts, leading to the impression that I really don't get up to all that much thinking. More recently, I've been trying to offset this by going on more walks and doing very banal things such as washing the dishes without looking at my phone and I think it's been positive since I am thinking much more during these periods. Doing such has spurred me on to finally put this thing together, as I find that often the act of writing down a stream of thoughts give weight to what was already floating around in my subconcious.

The second reason I've put off creating a blog is that I wasn't quite sure what the best approach would be. For a while I debated just downloading some off the shelf blogging software or starting a substack, but they just didn't sit all that right with me. Part of this is coupled to my job and enjoyment of being a web designer, I enjoy the act of website design and passing up on the opportunity to make it for myself didn't feel right. So eventually I read that HeydonWorks was using 11ty as their foundation for building their own blog and decided to try it out for myself.

I'm a big fan of picking up a new tool or framework when working on a personal project to make sure I continue to learn and experience new things. I found 11ty quite tough to pick up, it seems like their documentation assumes a fair big of knowledge about the templating languages and various other bits and bobs. Nevertheless, I took my time going through (with a lot of help from Kevin Powell's video using 11ty) and eventually got it working how I wanted. It's mostly a very simple setup, but I put in a bit of extra work to create an AI crawler labyrinth as he described in his blog post on the topic of poisoning well.

And now I have a blog set up! Admittedly, it is very barebones. At the time of writing this, I don't have several of the niceties I want such as an RSS feed and a dark mode option but at some point it's important to stop fiddling with the settings and actually post something of value. I'm sure I'll continue to fiddle with the layout for many months to come (that is a big reason I went with a static site generator after all) which I am very much looking forward to. One major thing I am intent on is to use as close to zero JavaScript as possible in this blog. Whilst I use the likes of React often in my work, I think it's nice to have a little less unperformant reactive mess on the Internet where possible.

For now, if anyone is reading this, I hope you enjoy your stay here. If I am able to inspire thought or joy in any way then it means the absolute world to me.