Testing New Waters

Table of contents

Is this thing on?

After countless amount of time trying to find a static-site generator that allows me to quickly get started with a theme that suits my preference, I’ve finally settled with Astro. I know, it calls itself more of a “web framework”, but I’m not that advanced to use it as such. At least for now.

For the longest time though, I’ve been trying to start using 11ty as my go-to static site generator. I’ve even tried understanding the templating language and following along a tutorial, but I got stuck in the middle of the lessons due to deprecated dependencies, though it seems like it has gotten updates since I last had that issue. Maybe one day I could try getting back to it? 🤔

In the meantime, I’ll stick to using this AstroPaper theme until I feel more comfortable in designing my own. It helps that there’s also a good number of nice-looking Astro themes I can use from the get go, including ones that could be suitable for an art portfolio website. That is unfortunately not the case with 11ty’s starter projects, although that mostly also comes from me being picky. And before you ask, I’ve tried looking for starter themes for Hugo as well, but again, my pickiness prevailed.

Why start a new blog?

Because I have … plenty of reasons.

1. I don’t feel like saying anything on microblogging sites anymore.

Think Twitter¹, Bluesky, or Fediverse (Mastodon-at-large). The character limits are too restrictive for me nowadays, and making continuous threads is tedious work. Not to mention the vitriol within fan spaces in such platforms these days, to name an example.

2. Instagram is definitely not a longform text platform.

Despite me having been more active there lately (due to real-life connections using it), it’s still a visual platform in the first place. The fact that I can only add 80 characters to a video repost is killing me, because hoo boy I sure love adding more context to what I have seen and reposted. And no, I won’t be signing up for Threads. I’ve seen some posts and it’s somehow more insufferable than Twitter.

3. I simply want to have a blog.

I need to find at least a use for all the domains² I’ve been hoarding, lol. And I also need to have my word vomits published somewhere so I feel less insane about the screams I’m hearing inside my head.

4. The Small or Indie Web, whichever you call it.

Getting into the small web (or indie web, depending on who you ask) has been really appealing to me, especially since I’ve been on the internet during the time when GeoCities was still alive, or when you could still customise your own MySpace pages. Hell, Multiply and Friendster were also still running back then.

What will I be blogging about, then?

While I have a vague statement on what I’ll write about in the homepage description, it’ll mostly be my random musings, really. One day I might write a small tech tutorial that could hopefully make lives easier, and another day I would be writing about my stationery obsession. One of these days I will have to fill in the interests section in my About page for giving you a more concrete idea of what I’m into, or I make a standalone page for that purpose, just like my Uses page.

And that’s pretty much it for this post! Can’t believe it’s already pretty long for a “first post”, haha. Then again as the letter for my future self that I wrote nearly a year ago said,

I’ve never been one of these conventional people, and at this point, I may never be one at all.

Thank you so much for reading this far, and hope to see you in my next posts! 👋

Footnotes