If I look back at the history of my personal online blog, I’ve actually written since 2014. I started with LiveJournal, then moved to Tumblr, then discovered Static Site Generators (SSGs) and started with Gatsby, Next.js, and finally, Astro.js.
When I was on LiveJournal, I wrote pretty consistently: I would average about 4 posts per week. This lasted for a good 2 years. While it may be attributed to me having more free time back time, I also feel like I had developed a habit of wanting to learn new things and sharing them with the world (mostly my friends and family). When I moved to Tumblr, I had pivoted to photography. The landing page was a grid of photos that I had taken throughout the year. While I wasn’t writing anymore, I am still creatively expressing myself through my photography.
One fine day, I fell into the rabbit hole of Static Site Generators. The promise was enticing - simple, fast and customizable. You would write your own code and customize to your heart’s content. Around the same time, the fear of hosting your data at a private corporation was on the rise. As you upload your posts and photos in the company’s database, you forfeit the rights to your content and allow these companies to own your output. So, the next logical move is to host my own website using an SSG and host all my content by myself.
What follows is years of tweaking and writing code and never writing or uploading photos ever again. I have not written anything since 2019. When I started with Gatsby, I chose a theme that I liked so that I could quickly implement and start writing. However, because I was able to see the code and the possibilities of customization, I kept tweaking my landing page so that it was pretty and screamed me. It tooks months and months of tweaking until I lost interest and left it at that. When Next.js was on the rise (and Gatsby was going through internal problems), I tried to rebuild with a new, sexy framework and go from there. This time around, the marketplace was too saturated with a lot of different themes that I decided to start from a blank slate. This was a bigger endeavour than before, and again, it resulted in me customizing and tweaking until I lost interest and quit.
Fast forward to today, I have finally rebuilt (again!) my personal website with Astro. I hope that with a pretty good build here, I can focus on writing and photography for the rest of the year.