I care about thoughtful design, and forcing your visitors to download dozens of megabytes of assets and JavaScript dependencies just to read a single article doesn’t feel very thoughtful to me. That’s why I’ve committed to a 1 megabyte upper limit for every page on this site. There’s also no point for there to be any JavaScript here, so I’d rather not include it, even if some fancy features may rely on it.
My goal on this website is simply to share my thoughts. I can’t really do that if I’m distracted by the framework. There should be minimal barriers between having an idea, and turning it into a blog post.
I think the simplest and most elegant way to build a personal website, and the approach I’ve taken here, is to use a Markdown-based static site generator. Markdown is nice (although I do have some complaints), and because the building blocks are so simple, the output should be cleanly viewable even on an old copy of Internet Explorer.
Now, I must admit, I did take the unnecessarily complicated route of building my own static site generator. It’s probably unnecessary, considering how many great tools already exist, but what can I say? I like building stuff.
Now, I have a system where I can update this site with very little effort. All I need to do is add a new file, write some content in Markdown, and commit it to the repo.