Writing First, Tooling Second

I am a strong proponent of running independent personal websites on your own domains and publishing your writing there. Doing so keeps the web diverse and decentralised, rather than concentrating most writing and discussion inside a small number of large platforms. It gives authors long term control over their work without being subject to changing policies or incentives. I think that a web made up of many small, individually run websites is more resilient and also more interesting than one dominated by a handful of social media services.

I often participate in discussions pertaining to authoring personal websites because this is an area I am passionate about. Any discussion about authoring websites that I take part in seems to drift, sooner or later, into tooling. Aspiring personal website authors worry at length about which blogging engine to use, which static site generator to pick, which templating language to choose and so on. I think none of this is important until you have published at least five articles on your website. Just write plain HTML and worry about tooling later.

This very website you are reading right now began its life as a loose collection of HTML files typed into Notepad on a Windows 98 machine. I wrote some text, wrapped it in basic markup and copied it to my web server's document root directory. That's it. Tooling came much later, in fact many years later. As the number of pages grew, I naturally wanted some consistency. I wanted a common layout for my pages, navigation links, a footer that did not need to be edited in twenty places. An early version of this website used HTML frames to accomplish these goals. Later, I rewrote the website in PHP. Now this website is generated using Common Lisp. All of these additions came later, after I had been maintaining this website for several years. None of this was required to begin.

Around 2006, when blogging had already become quite fashionable, I reorganised a large portion of this website into a chronological list of posts. I added an RSS feed and adopted some of the conventions that people now associate with blogs. Even so, the transformation was never total. To this day, many pages remain as loose documents, scattered in various corners of this website, never folded into the blog format at all. My point is that not everything needs to belong to a blog. Not every website needs to be a blog. A website can just as well be a collection of pages, arranged in whatever way makes sense to you. The blog is merely one possible organising principle, not a requirement. If your goal is to share your thoughts on your personal web space, then worrying about blogging and tooling can become counterproductive. Just write your posts first, in plain HTML if need be.

If you truly dislike writing HTML, that is fine too. Write in Markdown, AsciiDoc or whatever plain text format you find pleasant and convert it to HTML using Pandoc or a similar tool. Yes, I am slightly undermining my own point here but I think a little bit of tooling to make your writing process enjoyable is reasonable. Tooling should exist to reduce friction, not to become the main ceremony. Personally, I write all my posts directly in HTML. I do not mind it at all. In fact, I enjoy it. But if you do not, it is easy to run your Markdown files through a converter and publish the result with only a little extra tooling overhead.

It is easy to spend days and weeks polishing a website setup, selecting the perfect generator, theme and deployment pipeline, only to end up with a beautifully engineered website whose sole content is a single 'hello world' post. That might not be very useful to you or anyone else, unless setting up the pipeline itself was your goal. By contrast, a scrappy website made up of standalone HTML pages might be useful to you as well as others. You can refer back to it months later. You can send someone a link. You can build on it gradually. Even if you never turn it into a blog, never add RSS, never migrate to the latest tooling, it still fulfills its most important purpose: it exists and it says something you wanted to say.

So to summarise my post here: Create the website. Publish something. Do it in the simplest way that lets you get your words onto the page and onto the web. Once you have content that you care about, tooling can follow. Your thoughts, your ideas, your personality and quirks are the essence of your website. Everything else is optional.