How I update my site

Most people who blog use some sort of tool that stands between them and the HTML your computer fetches from the server. Even if it’s not a fully-fledged content management system, they will at least use a static site generator to save a lot of repetition. That’s not the case here on gomesite.

Every HTML file you view here has been hand-edited by me. That’s right: organic, cage-free, free-range HTML. I usually write my posts on my main machine, adding them to the journal index, the RSS feed, and the front page. Once the changes are ready, I push them to the git repository for gomesite kindly hosted by tildegit. Then, I SSH into the Ctrl-C server and pull the updates into the copy of the repo in my public_html folder.

My POV updating the site every day

Why do I do things this way? Isn’t this the wettest way to write a website? Well, sure, there’s a lot of boilerplate with the journal now, but when I started building gomepage, the site was so simple there was really nothing that needed generation.

When I started the writing challenge, I considered setting up a static site generation solution for the journal, since I foresaw the repetition in doing it manually. But when I think about how long it actually takes to set up an SSG, I was not at all sure it would be worth it, even after 100 repetitions. In the spirit of xkcd, if I were to save myself five minutes 100 times with an SSG, then it would only be worth it if I spent less than 8 hours and 20 minutes on it.

Time optimization aside, I just don’t really want to automate my site. The only SSG I’ve ever used is Jekyll and while I liked it enough, what I don’t like is the Ruby dependency, because literally nothing else I use is in the Ruby ecosystem. Learning a new system doesn’t sound like much fun right now, either. Even with how error-prone the process is, the repetition is actually kind of nice. It keeps me mindful of how my whole site fits together, which I appreciate.

Do you have a site or page you update regularly? What do you use to update it? Do you have something you actually like doing repetitively, rather than automating it? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.