I started building websites 20+ years ago. I gave up caring about all of it and just wanted something that just worked. From there I danced around all sorts of alternatives. Where the primary for this project was to track a history of my art. As I have aged I have wanted a site that carried the original purpose while providing me an outlet to archive other aspects of my life. Primarily my thoughts, wonderings and explorations into new adventures.

This change created a challenge. How do I create a site that can auto generate static pages based on text documents pushed to a code repository. This way I can put simple thoughts down quickly, utilize known quantities such as markdown and not have to learn the new age intracacies of web development.

In steps site genrators such as 11ty.dev. This moving forward will be foray into the web world devoid of constant updates, login pages, and comment sections. If you like my work tell other people or tell me direct, if you don't then go yell at some clouds or shutup. Any option works for me.

This is a complete site rebuild. Going back to the old days of when I would actually code up my own website. I remember laboring over the dumbest shit imaginable. The hours I wasted over pixel perfect sites, and dealing with IE (fuck you! and your non-standard redering), formed one part of my path forward. I stopped caring about building a site by hand when the boom of CSS & JS was taking over sites. I just couldn't keep up. So I gave up and have been utilizing tools to build my sites for me. That is unil now...

For years I have wanted a wanted a simple way of using simple text, like restructured text or markdown, to render a blog post. I came close to using Bear Blog (which is clearly an inspiration for this sites design), but I have always been a bit leary of storing my images on anything other than a server that I manage. So I went hunting and in comes the star of this show 11ty.

11ty, is an amazing little tool that is perfect for what I need. A static site generator, that can quickly convert text to a page, as well as easily iterate over the images I have and present them without a ton management. Along with the ease of use, there is no dumb shit like logins, comment sections, js code doing god knows what. All the code is there, plane and simple. Just right-click and inspect for yourself. If you want to see how the sausage is made just take a gander here. It is "relativly" simple and strait forward.

At this point the site is pretty set, but I am sure my ADHD won't let me go without playing with it from time to time.