I looked at this site the other day and realized the last post was from 2019. This is basically typical for me. When I was a teenager I had a stack of journals that each started with a line like, “I’ve bought this new journal and this time I intend to write regularly”. The remaining ninety nine pages were invariably empty.

The previous version of this site was built on Gatsby. The idea was just a simple static site with posts written in Markdown that could be compiled by Github Actions and hosted on Github Pages. The design was a basic template I found and further simplified. I launched it, wrote a few posts, and then disappeared on a five year voyage building Evernow.

A few weeks ago I started a project to bring this back up to date. The goals: simple, opinionated design, no ops maintenance, and no CMS. I had a few options that I explored:

• Updating the existing Gatsby site – I spent an afternoon trying to update all the dependencies from five years of change and never got it to clean. I gave up after trying to port the existing design into a fresh install and getting nowhere fast. I’m sure I could have gotten to a modern, typography–centric template, but nothing felt easy.

• Hugo – To its credit, it is very fast, but I’m not sure if that’s a selling point that matters. I found it surprisingly difficult to perform basic tasks, such as rendering images stored in the filesystem within markdown documents. Perhaps it’d be better if I wanted to use a CMS.

• NextJS – It can do anything, including blogs. I’ve spent a lot of professional time wrestling with it, and getting started brought up memories of past frustrations. It’s more than I need, and perhaps more complex than the web needs at this point.

A friend recommended I look at Astro. Mark Horn’s astro-nano hit all the right design marks for me out of the gate: it’s adaptive, built on top of Tailwind, has no external dependencies after compilation, and just looks great. Smart, sensible defaults everywhere.

So, with the framework and template selected, it was mostly an exercise in moving the limited content over and getting the Astro => Github Pages action up and running.

Will I write more now that I’ve got a new journal? Odds are low, but I’m working on it.