[axegon_]

I feel you as far as centralization is concerned.

Personally I've been meaning to start writing for some time now but I keep kicking the can down the road for multiple reasons.

Problem 1: Lack of time, other more important things that I need to take care of and basically life in general - I've had serious time constraints during the last few years. Which I have been able to considerably improve lately. Which is completely unrelated to the lockdown and has more to do with me figuring out how to organize everything and catch up. And ultimately I've been looking into starting again lately.

Problem 2: The absence of a decent platform: I really don't want to deal with maintaining a database or a server for the purpose of serving text and images.

Problem 3: sphinx, hugo, and all other static site generators, while great, are not self-contained and a huge overkill imo for a personal site/blog. Meaning that managing them on the go is still painful - I'd have to setup a ci/cd to manage them, which I feel is the same as having a database and a server somewhere.

So I tried to somewhat fix problem 2 and 3 and built something from scratch myself - a small dartlang-based site(as I've stated a million times, i abhor javascript with a passion and just seeing it makes me vomit), which operates with either html or markdown pages, simple href and routing. The point is that at any given time I can unlock my phone, ssh into any of my servers, add a .md file, add a link, commit and push and forget about it.

I've been meaning to open-soruce the whole thing and if someone's interested they can use it. All in all, the end result is a transpiled js file from dart, which is ~90kb gzipped, an index.html and a yml file which allows you to customize stuff.

If anyone is interested, you can have a look at http://axegon.com.

[cyberpip]

Would love you to elaborate on how you organize and catch up - it's a constant battle. I get a LOT done but I definitely sacrifice other aspects of life in the name of getting things done.

Back on the topic of blogging, I agree with your points about maintenance. I think if the goal is purely writing and having it be accessible on the internet, html and a minimal amount of css are going to have the lowest overhead, best performance, be portable, and be easiest to maintain, won't it? It depends on if you want extra functionality of course but if the intention really is just to write, html works fine?

[axegon_]

Oh boy, this is a long one and a bit off topic but oh well...

> I definitely sacrifice other aspects of life in the name of getting things done.

You kind of nailed it. It's just a question of what kind of sacrifices you're willing to make. In my case, at a young age(20-ish) due to a million and one reasons(parents far away and unable to help, those supposed to be "close" to me stabbing me in the back without any hesitation whatsoever), this became my personal life. It sounds pretty sad that I spent most of my 20's buried in work but long-term, if that hadn't been the case, my mind cannot even begin to imagine how I would have been able to handle everything that came after that. And even till this day, sacrificing my personal life is always the simple and obvious choice, at the expense of some occasional gloomy moods of course. As a side effect, I became very self-sufficient, which does come in handy when someone close to me is facing a problem - I can give a hand. It also pushed me to develop some extreme pedantism which would make the stereotype for German pedantism look like child's play. But one of the most crucial things I do is I spent 30 minutes before bedtime reviewing all my todo's, appointments, arrangements and issues, 15 minutes of which I spend sorting them by priority:

1. Critical - near life and death situations, forget sleeping, eating or showering, tackle as soon as I finish the list.

2. High - Something that needs to be resolved within the next 2 days.

3. Medium - Can hold for a week but get to them asap.

4. Low - Completely trivial but annoying stuff like being out of coffee.

The next 15 minutes I make a plan about each of the things on the list, and set alarms, notes, reminders and routes if that involves going somewhere.

On the subject of notes - English isn't my first language, however unless any of the things on the list are strictly local, all notes are in English, even the coffee shortage: more resources online, easier to search and get informed if needed. I can't tell you how much time that has saved me.

As soon as priorities of type 1 and 2 are clear, life can proceed as normal. Now that you made me think about it, this process might have taught me to build incredibly elaborate and complex plans with little to no effort and being incredibly flexible. I really hadn't thought about it but there might be something to this, who knows... Bottom line is, despite a number of brutal challenges in the last several years, those few simple rules have kept me sane, have helped me solve all of them while staying healthy and fit. And at the moment I can honestly enjoy my weekend.

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As for the blogging, and clean HTML - yes and no. It is definitely the easiest to setup and get running, I agree. But if I'm on the go and the only thing I have on me is my phone, writing HTML over ssh isn't really ideal. Which is why I built this - it renders markdown as HTML out of the box, so adding something is as easy as creating an .md file, adding a link, commit and push. This will take you 10-15 minutes to set-up but it renders well on all devices I've tried, and has absolutely 0 maintenance required afterwards.