Why build a blog?
With the swirling nexus of crap surrounding social media at the moment, a lot of people are talking its implications on the greater internet.
I read an interesting blog post which likened social media to sharecropping. The general idea is that social media platforms take advantage of user generated content, without actually providing very much in the way to innovation or usability. They rely on their userbase to drive engagement, and then monetize that engagement. Often, the userbase gets no real benefit! (Arguments can of course be made for a unified experience, consumer laziness, and other benifits of centralization - that's probably good fuel for another post)
This is in pretty strong contrast to what the article deems "the old web". Back in the day, people hosted their own websites. They ran blogs, subscribed to RSS feeds, and interacted via comments and email. There were platforms, of course, but this "maintain your own social engagement" usage pattern was still alive and well.
So, in an effort to join others who want to migrate back to this "old" style of doing things, I made a blog.
But why "build" a blog?
I'm a victim of the age old developer curse - "not built here" syndrome. I like my software the way I like my software: mine. I enjoy hacking things together, clacking away in an editor, and sweating over bugs.
But most of all, I like being lazy. For some reason, it's easier for me to design a system I like using than learn an existing one. There are a million static HTML generators out there, but instead of learning any of those systems, I rolled my own. It's probably worse. And less useable. And likely took more time to write than it would to learn any of the open source options out there.
But it's mine.
So what is it?
Literally just a 60 line Python script that converts Markdown (with some metadata) to HTML, and tosses it into a Jinja2 template.
I know.