There and Back Again
There is nothing more indecisive than myself. I find myself picking up new laptops, new projects and new fixations what feels like every other year. I'm like a log being carried by a river, occasionally jamming myself into a spot that I find comfortable, only for the spot to be uncomfortable a year later and I'm moving again.
Case in point: My website. Every good internet carpenter-plumber-handyman has one, right?
According to my DNS provider, I've had this domain since March 2023. And I really gave it all the bells and whistles. I set up a storage volume in the cloud. I pointed my domain to it. I even used the provider's CDN to get it across the globe that much quicker.
Now this is all very cool. But now I need a way to update it. Write some blogs. But I don't want to just sling some HTML around— what if I want to update page headers? Then I'll have to go into every single file and update it. That won't do.
So now I get a static site generator—pick any of them, really—grab a template, and write a file. It works! Pure words turn into HTML. Okay, now I get git to push to my cloud storage whenever I make a change, and voila, I'm done.
But I never did update this website did I?
It wasn't me. It was a boring gray slate with words. Maybe if I was a better JS programmer, I would be able to edit my own themes for the generator. But I wasn't. And that sounded like a lot of work.
So, my site sat there, neglected like many poor kicked-to-the-curb self-hosted website blog thingies. A nice piece of lawn art that slowly grew more decrepit and stale as the present past the copyright year in the footer of the page.
I don't know when I gathered the courage to try again. I think I was playing a lot of Starbound— it's not that obvious, is it?— and wanted to take a piece of that game and turn it into my own internet home.
Seems pretty cozy so far. Maybe I'll remember to check back in.