Tragedy: I want to redesign this blog
This has been a long time coming and totally expected. Several things are outdated:
I am not a Tailwind guy--really
But this blog is set up in tailwind. Why? I couldn't tell you. No wait, I can. It's because I found a blog template in tailwind that looks pretty good and lightly hijacked it to suit my purposes. This is great but now everything feels "locked in" and the css feels wierd to edit. Everything is an incantation--you say the right class and viola, you got your thing looking how you want. Feels like you're casting a spell Harry Potter style. What happened to just editing css raw like a psychopath?
The self-hosted blog format is not better than Substack
Platformed vs self-hosted blogs are an interesting problem. Back in the Xanga days, everyone's blog was on it and you'd give 2 e-props (almost like digital cash!) to blog posts that resonated with you. Xanga gave you a built-in platform. Same with Substack. Same with Dev.to and to a lesser extent, Medium
Substack gives your content a shot at being read. Dev.to gives you an audience / network of developers. Self-hosted gives me what, autonomy?
More interactive blog posts! With Data!? 🤌
What if I wanted to include an interactive chart / graph with my blog post? The mdx format makes this possible but I'm totally at odds here with time--in that I have not invested enough into exploring mdx to figure out what the limits of that format actually are. Looks like this will be on my reading list: https://mdxjs.com/guides/embed/
Habits
I don't post here regularly--as one can tell. I'm more of a sh*tposter on Twitter / X. Habits can change though.
Conclusion
My blog is tragically under-utilized. Chronic under-utilization and desire for change has manifested itself in wanting to re-design this entire blog. Actual remedy might be to blog more.
--Jimmy