First off, an update: I decided not to use GitHub's Jekyll integration for this blog, at least not yet. After my previous update I kept building it from scratch, and ran into some interesting problems to solve. How do I use Styled Components/Styled System on a statically generated site? How do I add analytics? How do I add tags and search?
Some of these questions were percolating when I started, but others have come up only because I got started. The unknown unknowns are what make projects like this interesting (and "interesting" comes in lots of flavors, including fun, time-consuming, and frustrating).
I was going through my backlog of JavaScript Weeklys and noticed this post by Valeri Karpov. I like his articles, so I added it to my newsletter triage.
Reading it made me feel validated, partly because I've also wondered why there are so many different static site generators, and partly because the way I built this blog is remarkably similar to his example (but with React instead of Vue). I suppose that's not surprising... it's not rocket science, but it was funny to see someone writing about process I've gone through over the past week or so.
I'm still not ruling out the idea of moving to something like NextJS or a platform like WordPress. But I don't plan on it until I run into some real limitations, or until building this stops being fun!
