henry is online


Not enough for me to leave

In a recent post, I lamented about the loss of Eleventy and the transition to Build Awesome and my dissatisfaction with the whole ordeal. Looking back, I got way to far over my skis about it.

Truthfully, I bet the house on Eleventy when I built this website. If I wasn't the way that I am (and was a lot smarter), I would have used a tool like Bear Blog or Pika — and in the case of Pika, I actually did use it and still recommend it. However, because of the way that I am, I wanted nothing more than to make things difficult for myself and roll my own website. This is still how I feel. I've also reached a point with this whole setup where writing in Obsidian[1], using a simple keyboard shortcut with an extension[2], and then using my shell script is just so much faster the faffing about with a web-based editor. I mean, it probably isn't, but I have a sunk-cost fallacy about it at this point.

Please hear the enormous sigh I give when I say this: I really don't know anymore. In some ways, I'm glad Eleventy has a business model that works, but in some ways I also just feel weird about the whole ordeal. This whole thing is a project for me, and I love/hate/love tinkering with this website and its infrastructure about as much as I enjoy writing these posts for it, which is to say I like it a lot. I probably won't change anything. Or I might migrate to Bear Blog. Who knows. I'll be sticking with Eleventy for the foreseeable future at least, If only because it works so well now and I can't destroy the have the one truly functional[3] technology stack I have on my life at the moment because I have feelings about Javascript. I do not have the time to create my own homework.

  1. Obsidian might be one of two exceptions to my "No Electron apps" rule/preference. It's generally well behaved and I get a lot of use out of it. I just dislike the trend of websites becoming applications, but I might just be old man yelling at clouds at this point. ↩︎

  2. This is an Obsidian-specific thing that I have very mixed feelings about. Extensions aren't the right solution the the problems with Obsidian, and more people end up trying to turn it into some fucked-up variant of Notion when they should just use it to write things down. I have strong feeling about this. I'm probably yelling at clouds. ↩︎

  3. Though I will say, the HTML that Eleventy currently spits out for my site looks awful. This is most likely user error, especially when so many other Eleventy-generated site on the Internet have excellent HTML. Some deranged part of me thinks that I could write better HTML by hand even though I get the markdown link brackets the wrong way around half the time. In fact, I know I couldn't write better HTML by hand because I wrote my CSS by hand and it looks even worse. I also know that I would feel this bizarre sense of pride if I hand-coded everything from scratch. ↩︎