Everyone Writes their own blog platform

A well-known trope in web development is at some point you'll write your own blog platform, it's the “Hello World” of web dev. One reason for this could be it's easier to work on something you already know than it is to actually write a blog post.

I'm not immune from such procrastinations. I've tried numerous blog platforms and static site generators, spent time learning the theming systems, optimizing dynamic image compression settings. But, each ended the same way, a git repo with a fully configured pipeline without any content.

So, in the sprite of the original .plan files, I've stripped everything back and gone for the simplest solution that works for me.

I've written three posts in the last week, so it seems to be working.

The 'simple' solution I've settled on is writing posts in Markdown using a lovely little editor called Apostrophe. I enjoy the clean UI and distraction-free mode.

PanDoc handles the generation of HTML. A small bash script loops over each *.md file and outputs the HTML into a build folder, and a single template.html file structures the output. All static assets live in a folder that is copied during build. That's it.

I don't write enough to need a complex build chain and I like hand optimizing assets on the command line with ffmpeg, pngquant and jpegoptim.

Finally, Cloudflare Pages handles the hosting. After every git commit, the build.sh runs and deploys the files to their CDN. I'm using the free tier because, well, the entire blog site is less than 1 MB and will see around five visitors a month.

All-in-all, it's been nice getting back to basics and focusing on what's important, the content.