Notes on Starting

Every personal site I have abandoned was abandoned for the same reason: at some point, maintaining the site became more interesting than writing for it. There was always a build to fix, a plugin to replace, a theme to redesign. The writing was the thing that got deferred.

So this one runs on a single rule.

Writing and publishing should be more work than maintaining the website.

Practically, that means a post is a Markdown file. It has a title, a date, some tags, and a draft flag. I add the file, I write, I merge it, and the homepage, the recent-post list, the tag pills and the feed all update on their own. There is nothing to remember to do afterwards, which is the only version of this I will actually keep up.

The second rule is quieter but matters just as much: simple things should be extremely simple, and complicated things should remain possible. Most of what I write will be prose. Occasionally something will want an equation, a plot you can drag, a synthesiser, or a small simulation running in the corner of the page. When that happens, the post should be able to become a piece of software without the rest of the site noticing.

That is the whole design. Everything else here is detail.