Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.
For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?
- if you go to https://oxal.org/blog/ you will see a small cyborg following you (started with a base image generated by chatgpt and then edited and added animations manually in Piskel sprite editor)
- it's deployed on a VPS manually, just run `make` (I've experimented with serving it via a handwritten C http server, but I haven't finished this toy project yet)
- i have several shell scripts which uploads things to my websites in private locations (think gists, quick share videos, screenshots etc.).
It’s good to see you here! For a long time I was just using your project Sakura CSS file to mane everything look pretty.
Even though I have moved on to using a mix of LaTeX.css and a two column theme, I still love using Sakura whenever I’m crafting a hand rolled HTML page for something.
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
This is exactly it!
My personal website https://pablo.rauzy.name/ is also entirely handcrafted, I use a few custom Bash scripts and a Makefile to build it (it is entirely static, no server side rendering, and not a single line of JS), and I have a lot of fun playing with CSS for example to make it responsive, have a mobile menu, etc. I probably (re)invented a few techniques in doing so but that's what's fun!
I'll add one thing: since April 2009 my website files are tracked using Git, which means I can go back to what it looked like at any point in time whenever I want (`git rev-list --count HEAD` gives me 2184 commits). It's been fun to show my students what my own website looked like when I was their age!
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
This is Journey Before Destination, the first ideal spoken by the Knights Radiant and a common trope across mythologies as seen with Job's suffering and Hercules' 12 steps to recovery.
Turns out they turned Hercules into a god to stop all the cool stuff he doing as a human :/ Don't let them take away your pain, don't let them take away your humanness. And if they do, just listen to some bird music instead.
I used to maintain a web site with a cobbled together script written in Guile. I still totally would do the same today.
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
Indeed. One of these days my company is going to pull my Claude usage logs and mark me down in my performance review for not using AI enough. But until that time comes I'm writing every line of code myself.
I feel this exactly. However, I find more fun to create and modify the site vs actually writing articles, so my deployments are probably 5x my actual blog posts. I got into computers because I love to code. I will still be here, writing dumb things for my own fun long after AI is the primary creator of professional coders.
> For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
To each their own. I wanted something functional. A stable platform which is organised. I also wanted to write more. Which I still haven't gotten to do. It's more of a functional project than an art project.
That doesn't mean the OP's website is bad. But that is not why I created my website. But I have thought about Writing HTML in HTML after being inspired from Writing HTML in HTML by John Ankarstrom [1]. But it will be a forever art project and not my real estate on the internet. It's OK to want different things from the indieweb. That's what makes it diverse.
Most of the tech blogs I run across are static sites. I understand the choice; to prioritize writing reads as pragmatic and I did that for a long time. At some point I got intrigued by being able to tailor my own editing experience and built my blog. It took months but now I use MarkdownIt and custom components in Vue to render the markdown in my posts. I built a commenting and moderation system.
I started all of this before LLMs but once I started using them it sped up my delivery substantially, especially with agents. It also informed how I use coding agents at work, which I think I've been able to adopt with relative ease and a higher success rate than most.
I think the difference is that I spent so much time tweaking the website that I wasn't writing. Moving back to Jekyll was entirely a move because I wanted to spend more of that time writing.
At the same time, I know that it limits me in other ways (for example, I'd love to have a way to post to my blog in one section and federate to bluesky and mastodon, and I know it's possible, but I would have to build it. So I'll eventually move from Jekyll.)
but a model could write blog posts that describe changes to the website as a blog-style changelog (e.g., 'today i spent an hour playing with CSS to change padding' or 'i refactored the backend to do more async calls')
I spent far more time writing my own generator with Babashka than I have putting actual content on the site. I was almost disappointed when I finished it. It doesn't support compiling stuff like TS or Elm, but the only JS on my site is a console.log that says there's no other JS on the entire site.
I'm spending more time than I'd like to admit thinking about how to achieve various ends using AsciiDoc(tor). I could just carry on with Jekyll, but why?
For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?
It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.
I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?