It’s that time, I guess. After (over)thinking about it, I decided to move back to a static site generator (SSG) in the end. WordPress was nice to write on, however I could feel the problems arising the moment I wanted to start configuring things beyond what WordPress allowed:
I also gave WordPress.com a try, and uh, I can’t hide Jetpack’s AI shit without paying. I don’t really care for AI when it comes to writing, and frankly, I don’t want to give WordPress money just to disable AI. What would be easy in HTML/CSS would have cost me hundreds a year, so I looked at building my site, and the result of that is the site you’re seeing right now.
The site is built using Hugo, which adds some plumbing to make building a site much less annoying. I tried Zola, and its templating system is much better than Hugo’s, but writing got a bit more annoying than I’d have hoped at the time, and I’m not sure of its stability given that I had quite literally tried it a few days after the 0.23.x era popped up, breaking a bunch of sites. Hugo has a bunch of shortcuts in its templating system for stuff like “group this section by year” that’s a bit of a faff to deal with in Zola, so it just felt like the best one to go for. It’s simpler to build once you learn the templating system, and writing is alright too. Not big on the shortcode system from Hugo, but it doesn’t stop it from being the overall best package right now. I’ve basically satisficed on Hugo for now.
Going static in general has a bunch of benefits over WordPress:
The main drawback is not having as nice an editor to write on, but I find that I’m slipping away from that anyways since what I want doesn’t match nicely to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors anyway.
It’s no secret that I am an overthinker. I have ADHD, and symptoms of OCD, and it genuinely does fuck my life up in more ways than one. I think the core part of the overthinking comes from my perfectionist tendencies, which makes sense given that I hear overthinking is actually just another form of anxiety, and that’s something I am learning to let go. I’m writing this on Visual Studio Code, in the text editor view, on my MacBook Air after pulling my hair out trying to find a good WYSIWYG Markdown editor. It’s actually nice, and actually not as bad as I catastrophised it to be. Harper got a bit annoying when I tried to check it, but that’s another issue. Even though I have my gripes with Hugo’s shortcode system, it’s fine. And fine is good. I need to learn to be happy with fine. I think Artemis’ post about people switching between SSGs kinda gave me a good kick up the ass about it.
I think for me, the way to stop my overthinking is to Just Do Things, and stop trying to be perfect. I do have my moments - my brain freaked out at the Markdown way of handling links, but that’s easy to deal with, just use VS Code’s built-in preview or preview the site itself, or just tolerate it. Problem solved. I think my tolerance towards distress has also lowered, maybe since I went on the Elvanse. So, having the site built this way probably counts as therapy, lol.
All that said, I love the way my site is designed now, and I built it with pretty much my own hands (with a bit of human and computer help where it was needed), and now I’m learning to sit nicely with Markdown. I’m still kinda building my workflow, right now I’m relying on Harper and a Hugo shortcode syntax extension, but I’m not urgently trying to get it sorted to perfection. Hell, I might not even be able to. But, it’s good enough so, whatever. If I decide to change the theme, also whatever - that’s fine too.
I added my site to the Atmosphere by using Automattic’s official plugin when I used WordPress. This is still something I am interested in, and thankfully Sequoia seems to work well for most asides from not having support for multi-section sites. But for now, they’ll just use old archives of the site as I migrate to Hugo.