Setting up the minimal blog

I found countless nicely designed blogs that have a single post, a post about setting up a blog (there is a popular meme about this). Some of these blogs had been in such state for years, suggesting that the author often didn’t find inspiration past the first post. I am not sure why is that, but yesterday I found out why they even publish that first post.

You see, setting up your blog with a static generator is a very rewarding process. And not because you finally see your minimal CSS being rendered. And definitely not because you are proud of your words. It is because you finally managed to get your static generator working, after spending hours reading materials on the web (most of which are outdated or generally represent a bad practice). This also explains why are so many static generators out there. Often writing a static generator seems easier than taming an existing one.

Last week, I wanted to create my blog with the Hugo. Having worked professionally on two medium-sized Hugo projects, (believe me, I did), it seemed to me that setup will be easy. But, I quickly remembered why I hated working with Hugo. Very fast I was spinning in vortex of bad Hugo documentation and weird design choices. Every answer for simple question I had seemed like an ad hock hack (it is the way it is).

Looking at other solutions, I realized that I want to use only templating syntaxes I already know. Static React renders seemed like a good idea until I discovered they are also driven by the move-fast-and-break-things philosophy (bonus 200 dependencies in node_modules). Naturally, the next thing that come to mind was writing my own static generator, but I know that time writing a post someone maybe will read is much better spent than time writing a generator nobody will use. At the end, I gave Hugo another shot, and just copied a template setup from GitHub (felt like cheating to my DIY mindset).

For now, I will use Hugo. And I promise I will publish the next post.