A new stack

Writing a blog means you have at least two things:

1. A platform, on which to write.
2. Things you’ve written.

We’re going to poke at the first of those - the pile of technologies that lets the blog work. The stack.

The host

There are no shortage of hosts that will let you put up content. Wordpress, with all the PHP and plugins you can stomach. Fancy site builders with full Content Management Systems already built in. I’ll confess, I was feeling a little nostalgic when I stumbled onto Neocities and decided that simpler was better. Sure there’s no FTP upload, but some things really are better left in the past.

The site

At first, I was drawn towards Rocket, but that’s because I was trying to use Web Components first, write a blog second. After a false start, I realized all I really wanted was a nice static site. Lo and behold, Static Site Generators are a whole category unto themselves in these enlightened days (FrontPage is no longer with us, praise be). I settled on using Hugo with the Hugo Bear Blog theme. I’m sadly comfortable with the gnarliness of Go’s text templating language, Markdown has become universal, and I still can’t style something to save my life.

The code

“Code is on computer, code is on website - done”. That was good enough for a while, but I’ve butchered enough hardware to get anxious if data isn’t synced into some sort of cloud. I didn’t want to fall into the GitHub trap, though - hosting pages and the code in the same place has a bad smell. Not to mention, SourceForge’s fall from grace should’ve been a lesson about eggs and baskets, not an example to follow. What I stumbled across was Radicle. Their hosting solution is Git with an automatic peer-to-peer layer. I commit, I push, and my code winds up replicated across some unknown number of other nodes, out there somewhere. It’s all I wanted, really - the binary security blanket of having the bits living somewhere that’s neither dev nor prod.

The future

Right now this site is static-static-static, which is honestly the point. If I wanted enagement-metric-dopamine, I’d be scumming around on LinkedIn or some other wretched hive of scum and villainy. Doess anyone even read Slashdot any more? That said, I’m curious just how much can actually be done by leveraging modern web techniques. Can I completely offshore the backend for everything from hit counters to comments? Is it seamless or ugly? What does “state of the art” look like today? They’re all questions for another time. Blogs do in fact need content.