22 Jun 2026
A blog is something I tried to start plenty of times over many years. But I've never succeeded. Too many decisions to make: what engine to use?; dynamic or static?; do I use blog.example.net or example.net/blog?; do I structure posts in yyyy/mm/dd subfolders or something less structured?; what about layout and colour themes?
What even is a blog anyway? To me, it comes down to a couple of key points. Firstly, its a time based journal of posts, on whatever topic the author wants to write about. Secondly, it should have a RSS (or atom) feed, because that's mostly how I access the world of blogs. Comments or webmentions should come as a 3rd requirement, but that's not on my immediate goals for today.
What a sensible person would have done years ago would be to open an account on some blogging platform somewhere and start writing. But I seem to always end up caught up in the how rather that the what and the why. Maybe I could self-host a wordpress site, but that really seems like overkill, and I'm not a fan of the dynamic site generators. I've looked a several different static generators, and I'm sure they're all fine. But I've never gained traction with any that I've tried.
So today I'm writing this out in a plain text editor, and then I'll wrap it in some basic html markup and push it up to my long neglected web site, and that will be my hand-crafted vanilla html blog site. Tomorrow I can add a RSS feed, and some CSS to make it less vanilla, but today I will have started.