taking a week to generate something that takes two minutes to make on tumblr

I hate mak­ing a Blog. Like, the kind with the cap­i­tal B, with an­a­lyt­ics and com­ments and search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion and shit, where it’s not merely enough for you to want to put your dumb words up on the in­ter­net, you need to know how many peo­ple watch and in­ter­act with it, and you need to treat your per­sonal web­site like you’re run­ning a so­cial me­dia plat­form, be­cause you need to be a Blog Writer. In a world where more and more of our shit is con­densed into pro­pri­etary web ser­vices whose free money faucets have got­ten plugged up, where every­thing has to turn a profit, even generic Blog stuff is be­gin­ning to look tame, be­cause even be­ing a Blog, as a Blog Writer, is no longer enough–if not for you, then for the very ex­pen­sive server you’re putting it on.

What I’m get­ting at here is that, when I started look­ing up plu­g­ins to shove into 11ty, what I’ve been us­ing to set this up, the two first things that came up on the screen for me were for search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion, and then for mon­e­ti­za­tion. The mon­e­ti­za­tion plu­gin is for a cryp­tocur­rency API, be­cause of course that’s some­thing a blog would have in 2024.

I do not need these things; I need a place to throw the dumb shit I write onto the com­puter, so I can put less of it on Twitter or Discord, and I don’t have to CTRL+F and gawk around for five min­utes to find that dumb shit. I barely even need tags, out­side of im­me­di­ate cat­e­gories, and that means ba­si­cally any nor­mal blog­ging plat­form is in­tensely overkill.

To some de­gree, this does mean that I just spent a week re-learn­ing HTML I un­learned at the age of 17, al­most ex­clu­sively so I could have a blog that does less, and, hon­estly? Yeah, it’s kind of nice!

Seriously! Think about all the pro­grams and ser­vices you have to use, on your phone, or at your com­puter, or when you draw or write, in your day-to-day life, and think about all the op­tions on those that you have to mouse over and scroll by, de­spite never need­ing it. There’s prob­a­bly dozens of but­tons, lit­tle bits and pieces of in­ter­face, that could have some­thing you ac­tu­ally need, but in­stead is for, like, Convert to Adobe Raw or what­ever, and mean­while the ac­tual thing you need to get to all the time is sev­eral menus deep and you can’t get it out any faster.

It is gen­uinely free­ing to have a setup where I can see a bunch of use­less shit I don’t want, be like “hm ac­tu­ally I don’t think I need this”, and then I can just take it out and re­place it with a thing I might want. I know why it’s not this easy for every­thing (remember to sup­port free and open source soft­ware), but god, I re­ally wish it was.