Using mataroa now!

Previously I've been experimenting with Hakyll, Zola, Hugo and a personal instance on Hetzner to serve my personal blog. I didn't like it, to be honest. Too much time was spent on inconsequential, tangential bullshit and not on the writing itself. Most of my complaints are actually skill issues - the skill being "web development with templating engines of a certain kind". I will not be spending my skill points on that...

Hakyll:

A promising choice for a minimal templating engine with no frills. Reality:

• You'll need the GHC to compile and run the thing - which is not so minimal, frankly speaking. If you are using a micro instance, that may be a problem, but I'm not sure. It just tends to eat a lot of storage sometimes.
• You still need to fuck around with CSS a lot, or inline html in order to display images the way you want them. There's an image rescaler - but for some reasons you would find it lacking, but it's not working how you expect it to work.
• Obviously you need to understand Haskell. It's not the same things as using xmonad, for example. In order to do meaningful changes to your site, you'll have to read the documentation and understand the syntax beyond simply pattern matching the rules and changing strings (as in xmonad).
• Now that I think about it, actually it was still pretty great - the whole thing was only ~150 lines of code not counting the templates.
• But just adding comments is simply out of scope. If you need comments, it's better to look for other options.

Hugo:

One of the more popular ones. A lot of documentation, tutorials, templates, themes, etc.

• You still needed to fuck with css (scss or whatever) and html.
• Installing a theme basically works as adding a submodule to your project. You'll need to fork it and maintain it separately. I went on to use a cactus theme and it was not compiling with the latest Hugo. In order to fix it, you'd want to fork it and then plug it back in. Which is a non-sustainable apporach, if you are not a web dev.
• You cannot just swtich between different themes - you'd have to rebuild (not as in hugo rebuild, but as in "rewrite the templates, move assets, add a new submodule".
• Adding comments was actually pretty easy (utterances).
• If you are not a web-dev or a full-stack, you'll have a hard time trying to fix all the plumbing in case something is not working the way think it should.

Lessons learned

It is very hard to have a vision and stick to it - even for a thing as simple as a personal blog. You would want to changesthings a little here and there and that will take a toll on you. In order to separate the act of fucking around with bullshit from actual writing - consider setting priorities for yourself or separating the content (markdowns and illustrations) into a separate repository. Otherwise at some point you'll find yourself in a silly spot, where you cannot write because of a CSS error or some other bullshit. At least you'd be able to write now and save it to separate place and publish later.

If for some reason Mataroa will not stick with me - I'll consider this approach.