Moving my notes to a static site
For years this site ran on a content management system that I never quite trusted. It worked, but every few weeks there was an update to apply, and every update was a small gamble that something would break. The whole thing felt heavier than what it actually was: a few hundred words at a time, posted a handful of times a year.
So over a weekend I tore it down and rebuilt it as plain static files. No database, no admin panel, no plugins. Each page is just HTML that I write in an editor and a small generator stitches together with a shared template. When I want to publish something, I add a file and copy the folder to the server. That's the entire workflow.
What I gained
Speed, mostly. A static page has nothing to compute — the server reads a file off disk and sends it. Load times dropped to the point where the network is the only thing left to wait on. There's also nothing to keep patched, which means the maintenance burden is close to zero. A site made of files will still open in ten years; I'm less sure the old stack would have.
The less obvious benefit is that writing got easier. When publishing is just "save a file," I stop fussing over the machinery and actually write. The friction was never the words; it was everything around them.
What I gave up
Comments, for one, though I didn't miss them. Anything dynamic now lives somewhere else, and the site is purely a place to read. That's a fair trade for something I want to keep running with as little thought as possible.
If you've been putting off a similar cleanup, this is your encouragement to do it. The simplest version of a personal site is usually the one that survives.
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