MP

Why Bother (Maintaining a Custom Blog)

So, other than posts that I'm importing from other sources, e.g. my medium profile, this is my first actual post written in the context of and entirely for this blog. I think that introspection of my motivations for doing things is always key to doing them well, as well as helping me to maintain my motivation for longer. I am definitely susceptible to starting projects and then letting them lie, which I'd prefer not to do here.

I'd like to dive in a bit to the negatives of doing all of the work to make this website a reality, and then explore what I view to be the positives. Hopefully by the time I finish, I'll better understand how I got here.

Why Doing this is a Bad Idea

Discoverability

I'm going to be honest. I don't know beans about search engine optimization (SEO). When I first started building websites back in the early aughts, none of my "clients" (i.e. friends of my parents') knew enough to request it. Since then, all of my web development has been at companies where the marketing people were responsible for all of those details.

One of the things that you get for free on a site like medium or dev.to is inbound traffic through recommendations and good SEO. This is a huge plus if you care about being discovered.

Luckily, I'm not doing this to be discovered! I'm doing it to have fun, to play around with technologies, and to have a place apart from any major company where I can express things just as I like.

Effort

Looking back at the git commits on the repo where I've got all this stuff stashed, my first commit was on March 14 of this year (it's currently the end of June). Of course, I wasn't actively working that whole time, and a lot of what I did was try out ideas that I thought would be interesting as a way of learning more Rust, but still. Four months of effort is a lot compared to throwing some thoughts into a WSYWIG and pressing "publish."

Complication

The actual process of writing one of these posts is simple. I write a Markdown file, run cargo generate, and then click a button in VSCode to publish the static files wherever I'm hosting the website (currently Azure). However, getting to the point where that simplicity is available took a lot of time and effort. Essentially what I have now is a custom templating engine written in Rust that generates static HTML files from the markdown sources. There are obviously a lot of moving pieces there, and any problems are up to me to fix. It's up to me to make sure that SSL is configured, that DNS records are correct, and a bunch of other minor details that are removed from you if you're using someone to host your blog.

Why I Love Doing This Anyway

Customization

There are some things I really care about as a consumer of online content, and maintaining my own site allows me to ensure that I can provide those things to anyone reading this site, too. Such concerns include:

By maintaining my own site, I can be sure that 100% of those things are provided 100% of the time. No one reading my content will be subjected to popups, cookie notifications, or poorly optimized SPAs that take upwards of five seconds to load. People using screen readers should have no trouble consuming the content here.

I also think that the interface on popular blogging platforms, particularly Medium, is not well-suited to programming-focused content. I wanted to be able to quickly toss in a code block and have it be properly formatted, just like on GitHub, e.g.:

/// This Rust code is properly formatted! And pretty!
fn main() {
    println!("What fools these mortals be!")
}

Fun

This has been and continues to be a really great learning experience. I don't get to play around with HTML and CSS much at work, and my current employer runs a Python/JS/Go stack, making my learning Rust an entirely personal endeavor. This site has been a great opportunity to make something real and nontrivial.

It's also great knowing that, as I go forward, I can add whatever functionality I like, experiment with any technologies that interest me, and be able to do it in my own time.

Long-term Suitability

One of my issues in the past has been a feeling that I always wanted to find a better place to put my content. I suspected I would eventually end up doing something like this, which largely prevented me from committing completely to any given platform. That is not a problem here. All of my content is in markdown files and tracked in GitHub. I can easily evolve the technical aspects of this site, or even move all of my content elsewhere. This gives me a sense of freedom, knowing that anything I write here is as permanent and specific to my own tastes as is humanly possible.

Prestige, Pride, &c.

This is the sneaky one. I think many people don't like to admit to themselves when they're doing things to make themselves look better or to feel like they're superior. And indeed, I think that if that is the primary motivation for anything, the effort is probably doomed to failure. That being said, ignoring it when it is a factor makes it harder to know when that sneaky motivation is causing you to act in ways you might not consciously want. So, obviously, with this project, there is some degree of:

So, the big goal here is to recognize that these feelings are present, and to never let them be the main drivers of my actions. As long as I'm more focused on having fun and making something good for goodness' sake, I think it won't be a problem.

Wrap

I imagine that this will become the main place that I go to get thoughts out of my head and "onto paper," as it were. I'll continue to have a good time exploring new ideas and technologies in order to put those thoughts out on the web. I hope that anyone who finds their way here finds some enjoyment from it. And that's all that really matters!

Created: 2019-06-29

Tags: general