war against bloat
When I had the idea of creating a personal website I had four conditions in my mind -
- No wordpress or tumblr or medium or substack
- It has to be fast
- It has to be lightweight
- No JavaScript!
Nothing against the language; I love JavaScript (TypeScript ftw and all that). But I wanted the site to be near 100% static. No cookies, trackers, no ad banners, no megabyte sized scripts, and no way for anyone to comment on my blogs. None of that bloaty nonsense. Ok, I might have to reconsider the last bit. I should allow some form of reader interaction in the site. #Todo. Anywho, consider this as my humble attempt at wielding the tiniest of swords and fighting a menacingly tiny goblin while the war against bloat rages all around me.
About the site -
In its first iteration I was creating all the html files for this site myself (handcrafted goodness) and copying them manually over to the server. It was a boring, repetitive process. So I started hunting for some static site generators. Hugo appealed to me greatly. But can we do a bit more minimal? That's when I stumbled on this nifty program created by Sunaina Pai. It's called makesite. Exactly what I was looking for. Now, all I do is write a quick markdown document and run the makesite.py and the deployment script -- et voilà! A brand new blog. That's it!
My current stack looks something like this. Serving hot and refreshing unbloated html and css via an nginx server on Ubuntu. There's some Docker in there somewhere. There always is. More on that later. THIS IS WAR!