First post on the new site. I'm building a minimal blogging system from scratch – just Ruby, Markdown, and a handful of HTML templates. No framework.
Why?
Existing static site generators come with too many features I'll never use. I want something I can fully understand, freely modify, and grow over time. LLMs can handle most of the tedious work anyway. Having built and torn down systems many times before, I know what I need and how to design it.
Here's how it works. Write in Markdown with YAML front matter. Push to GitHub. The server pulls the changes and builds the site. No unnecessary complexity from the start – I'll add things as the need arises.
Over the years I've tried all sorts of setups – home servers, cloud services, various blogging platforms. By keeping the text data on GitHub this time, I want to make sure there is a lasting record of what I've written and what I've built. "Lasting record" may sound grandiose, but that's the idea.
That said, I do wonder: will data uploaded to GitHub really survive in the long run – even after I'm gone? GitHub did once run a project called the Arctic Code Vault, storing repository snapshots on film designed to last 1,000 years, deep in an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway. Of course, the vast majority of GitHub data is not physically archived in the Arctic, and there is no guarantee it will be preserved for a thousand years or more. Repositories that were included in the archive got this badge on their contributors' profiles.
