June.03 - First post in this, my new hand-built site, explaining what I'm doing here

My first post in the new hand-built will definitely either save-me-from-or-definitely-cause-a-stress-induced-aneurysm blog!

Whoah, will this actually work? That's wild if it does. I have no freaking clue what I'm doing.

I was complaining to friends tonight, both of whom are software engineers, that trying to hand code a website when you aren't a very technical person, is like saying, "I want to make bread," and then discovering that in order to do so, you'll need to learn how to build a wheat threshing machine.

Part of the problem is that I spend a lot of time on Mastodon, where it feels like 97% of the population is made up of people who spend their days building wheat threshing machines, so you get a lot of people talking about how wonderful bread is how easy it is to bake bread - especially if you download these instructions on GitHub.

A couple years ago I got it into my head to do this, to build my own website, and I ended up wasting a few thousand valuable hours of my life banging my head against first Hugo, and then Eleventy. These are both fine...uh...apps? Content management systems? I don't even know, they involve learning to use your Terminal window and then first sending email to your friend in Australia who generously offered to help with Hugo, and then next sitting up with your friend from Colorado (one of the friends you whined at tonight), getting help with Eleventy.

When that didn't work, it involved several more hours of your devastatingly handsome and brilliant software engineer husband, explaining to you, in great detail, why you are, in point of fact, more intelligent than an amoeba.

After that, I stopped. I went to wonderful blogging sites that do the work for you, like Pika.page and Bearblog.dev, and I highly recommend both of these.

So why didn't I stay? I'll write a list of those reasons later, but the gist of it is that I just wanted the joy of building something by hand and knowing that I have 100% full control over it. Everything is a walled garden these days. I wanted to get out in the wild, feel the wind in my hair a little.

I'm going to write down how I do all this (don't ask me to make a YouTube video, good lord), for anyone else who is feeling unhinged or totally hinged enough to try this (I really think it's a binary state). It is really fun to tinker, and if no one has seen fit to provide you with a garage and a blow torch and a set of tools (because they lack courage), then tinkering on a website can be a good alternative.

That said, if you aren't techie and you don't know what you're doing and you're thinking you might do this to relax, I'd suggest trying other things first, like meditation, or solving the energy crisis, or asending the papacy. You have a lot of options, is all I'm saying.

But for now, I'm doing this.

And this has nothing to do with any of the above, but just, witness how cute Zoe the Labrador was this afternoon. Her cuteness makes everything better. She's really hard to photograph because she vibrates on some high frequency that makes most photos of her come out blurred. She's probably some celestial being in dog form.