I considered starting a blog early last year, and two weeks ago I finally decided to make it happen. It would be built with basic HTML and CSS so I could focus more on the blogging aspect, and less on developing the site. That didn't even last one day.
I don't want to give a play-by-play for how it went down, but to summarize: I created a very basic HTML and CSS website, added a little bit of JavaScript for the theme selector and code block syntax highlighting, and then I spent two weeks building a static site generator from scratch to build a minimalist blog site from templates and config files.
Why did I do that? I had convinced myself that adding new articles would be too tedious and tricky. It would require going into every existing article HTML file and updating the sidebar links with the new article. So a convenient script was created to handle that, which turned into a series of convenient scripts, which evolved into fetching data from yaml configs to populate HTML templates and generate the entire site.
This was all done for the blog you are reading right now. Yes, this minimalist blog format was generated with a complex system of scripts and config files because...that seemed easier, I guess? Or at least, that's how I rationalized it. The reality is that it was procrastination, along with convenient excuses.
"It makes blogging easier, so I'm more likely to do it."
"It's a good learning experience."
"I can use it as a porfolio show piece."
"It's fun, and life is too short."
People are great at rationalizing their decisions. They can even rationalize doing those rationalizations. And while those excuses are indeed great reasons to make things, at some point you have to recognize when your goal is being de-railed if you ever want to achieve it.
My blog site generator doesn't have every feature I would like to add, but it's more than good enough to start blogging, so there is no reason to continue adding features at this time. That aspect of it is done for now.
Okay, great, I've overcome my procrastination. Now to finally start blogging! But what to write about? During all of this, I was also brainstorming blog ideas. I think there are some good ones, but I couldn't pick and just needed to get started. And that's where this blog post comes in. So in the name of doing something, my first blog post is about...making my first blog post.
This is just a reminder to myself and anyone who happens to read this, that it's easy to rationalize procrastination, or to fall into the analysis paralysis trap. Both of these things are counter-productive to the actual goal. And while I did enjoy building a minimalist static blog site generator, it wasn't on my list of personal projects I wanted to spend my limited free time building.
If you'd like to check out the project source, you can follow the github link below. Star it, fork it, and use it if you so please. It's free and open source.