Finding What Sticks
I think one of the most common posts on my blog is about switching to a new blog system. Ghost to Jekyll and GitHub pages to Nuxt on Netlify to 11ty on Netlify to adding a micropub integration to be able to post from iA Writer. I’m probably missing a few. It’s kinda exhausting.
As I’m getting older, I’m finding myself having less patience for fiddling around with my website stack. That’s why I’m pretty excited about Blot. I used to love messing with the build process of my blog and getting it just right, owning the whole thing. Now I kinda feel like paying someone else to do that for me. Blot is great because I don’t even have to remember to push a post to my git repo. As soon as it’s saved to Dropbox, Blot updates within seconds. Pretty much as simple as it gets. My homegrown system was sort of simple—once you subtract all the dev work and maintenance—but certainly not this simple. And simplicity seems pretty key to making something sticky.
Moving over to something like Blot honestly feels more liberating than I was expecting. I didn’t spend a ton of time thinking about my blog infrastructure, but I also didn’t spend zero time thinking about it. There was always some bug to be fixed, some improvement to be made, some dependency to update. Giving that work to someone else frees up a few more cycles in my brain. Which I appreciate.
I still like fiddling around with stuff. Pretty sure it’s in my genes. But I’ve been finding myself looking for ways to offload some of that work, which gives me time to tinker with the projects I really enjoy. I do enjoy changing up my processes, but I also like it end I can find something that sticks—one less thing to worry about, at least until the next hot thing pops up. Right now, Blot feels like something that will stick. Time will tell, but I’ve got a good feeling about this one.