I had fun setting up and deploying this site, but throughout the process, I had this nagging voice in my head alternating between “No one will visit this.”, “Isn’t it vain to have a personal site?”, and “Why are you using a static site generator instead of writing it?” As an exercise and a form of self-soothing, I will attempt to answer these questions/accusations.
Photo Details
Camera: E-M5MarkIIILens: OLYMPUS M.12-45mm F4.0
Focal Length: 45mm
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/2000s
ISO: 125
Taken: November 12, 2022 3:21 PM
Full Size: 4783x3587 (17 MP)
No One Will Visit
This one… is probably true. I am not a well-known person outside my extremely small social circle, and I’m not cool enough to write interesting technical blogs that will make it to the top of Hacker News. But my family loves seeing the photos I take, so if nothing else, this gives me a way to share that with them that they can share with others in turn, without relying on a third-party social network.
I’ll submit it to the search engines and see what happens. I used to care a great deal about being the top hit for “Jake Basile,” but I’m old enough now where I don’t really care.
Isn't It Vain?
Probably. I decided that I don’t really care. It’s my domain name, and I can do what I want with it, and if anyone has a problem with that, they can pound sand. Plenty of people post far more vanity on Twitter and TikTok than I anticipate ever being able to generate for this site.
Anyways, the time for vanity is past - I registered jakebasile\.(com|net|info|us) many years ago,
and I don’t intend on giving them up anyways. I always stuck with the .com TLD since
it’s, of course, the primary one everyone thinks of, and it’s too late to change now. Plus, JBDC is
almost like JDBC, which
pleases me.
Why A Static Generator?
I could have written this entire thing from “scratch” (as much as anything written in a higher-level language is “from scratch”) if I wanted to. It’s not like I don’t have the skills to do so. I could have done my own static site generator or made it dynamic and generated from custom code. But why? I don’t have a plan to add anything that would be enhanced by a dynamic server - I have no need for comments or an actual database. I just want to put some markup and various other files on the net and let people see them. Having established that it will be a static site, why not write my own generator? I’ve done it before, but there are hundreds of existing software tools to do this. Why waste time? What benefit would it have when almost by definition the result would be the same? As for Hugo, why not? It’s popular, and Go’s templating language is powerful and only slightly painful to write.
And besides, I do stuff like that all day at work. This is a chance for me to spread my wings a bit and do things in a more relaxed way. I got to make my own decisions without having to think about all the stuff I do in my day job - just “how do I want to do this, now?” It was fun.