I’ve been talking a bit with ChatGPT about my site. Mostly because I struggle with the hows of the site, instead of the why of the site. Rather, I am more focused on the experience of posting than posting in of itself. So I reached out to GPT to see what they thought of it.

I’m pleased to say that they provided a really good answer. My human summary: Is it worth upending what you have working for something that may not be everything you want it to be?

The idea that most of my pain points are really just me looking at what other systems are doing and wondering if I should do that, too. Generally, the answer is no. I don’t have scads and scads of content. The site, as it sits currently runs ~80kb (~160kb with everything) with brotli compression. It’s not slow. Perhaps it’s not as performant as it could be, but I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that everything that can be lazy loaded is, to help keep requests to a minimum.

I also have a bunch of really familiar tooling backing me. The site is ‘built’ using Emacs, make, sed and cat. It’s all launched up to the Internet via rsync and most of the other work is done by me in the shell or Emacs, by hand. That way I know I’ve done it right, or at the very least I know where I screwed up. All of the tools are battle-tested. The biggest issue I had, in retrospect is that writing HTML directly in the index.html file was killing my thought process, and therefore canceling posts before I got anywhere. Even with things like yasnippet, web-mode and emmet making it easy to generate scaffolding and templates.

For that, I came to the conclusion of just having a folder that doesn’t get uploaded called ‘drafts’. I write in markdown or org-mode and use pandoc to generate the markup needed. Writing in this way frees me from having to think too much about the structure and boring parts. As a bonus, I can still include HTML in these formats that gets passed through. So I can just tweak yasnippet to provide the same templates for Markdown mode, and when I type dogal, it expands to the same gallery skeleton as it would in web-mode.

I’m thankful that I can just bounce ideas off of someone or something like ChatGPT, because often this kind of ‘rubber-ducky’ problem solving is what is needed, instead of a bunch of opinions on what the best platform is.

So, here I stay. While it’s not the best blogging system. It’s mine. And I know how it works, and I control it from start to end. And that’s important to me.