Yet another website reboot
Every year around this time I get an uncontrollable urge to redo my personal website. It's total madness but I don't know how to stop it. I am very inspired by other bloggers who are able to sustain a coherent presence on the internet for decades, and I want to be one of them. I always think I've narrowed down the problem and have a reasonable solution in mind, but really it's just the same cycle repeating itself.
Anyway, with full awareness that I am probably going to be throwing this all out again next year, I'm embarking on yet another journey to build the ideal website publishing solution. I wrote an article a while ago about what I want in a static site generator, and I've been thinking more about it lately, as I reflect on all the things I want to write about but don't because I don't like the experience of publishing new content.
I've realized that the writing experience needs to be completely separate from the publishing experience. I don't want it to feel like I'm developing my website every time I want to publish new content. I'm not one of those developers who loves using the command line for everything. Opening a terminal makes me feel like I'm working, and I don't want writing to feel like that. I like development, but a lot of times I'm in a totally different headspace when I'm writing and don't want to get bogged down with build scripts and configuration just to publish something new. I've also come to prefer writing in purpose-built tools, that have things like internal linking and spell check built in. I'm writing this in Obsidian right now and the experience is so much better than composing text in a code editor.
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about this and am going to it another go. I'd like to be able to keep writing in Obsidian, or some similar tool, but use that content to populate a website. Part of what makes this hard is that it's not easily done as as static site, which I prefer, but it seems like that's just maybe not realistic given the functionality I want. We'll see!