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.