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Building Something New

•2 min read

I've hosted a personal website at this domain for a long time, since roughly 2000. I first hosted it on Movable Type, then moved it to Tumblr, where it still exists today. Some time after they were bought by Yahoo, I decided I didn't want it hosted on anyone else's platform anymore. After trying but ultimately dismissing a few static site generators, I decided on WordPress.

The problem was that I never really liked WordPress. I gave in because it seemed like the least bad option - at least it's widely used, so solving problems or adding features via plugins would be easier. I don't need anything complicated after all, and it's good enough and easy to host cheaply.

At the end of the day, though, I could just never get past the fact that I disliked it as a piece of software. So this site languished. I basically stopped posting to it, and it just looked like another dead blog on the internet.

Now that it's so easy to create software with AI, I decided to just make my own blogging platform. Right now, it's pretty basic, with support for creating blog posts and static pages, but I hope to expand it over time.

I wanted to build it with a simple tech stack that would work easily off-the-shelf, and about which modern LLMs would have a lot of knowledge, so I chose NextJS, PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn for UI components. It's all hosted on Railway. This is still just a lot of stuff, but in the end I think it's worth it. I don't want a purely statically generated site. I want it hosted because I'd like to include some functionality that requires a hosted service.

More important than the specifics of the tech stack, though, is the fact that I want it to be more of a "hacker's blogging platform". This is a pretty vague term, but to me right now, this means a couple of concrete features:

  1. Using keyboard shortcuts for everything. I always want this in every piece of software I use.
  2. Vim keybindings in the text editor used to compose both blog posts and pages. I just strongly prefer Vim to any other editor, and want to use it everywhere. I know there are ways to hack it into browser text editing, but now I don't have to.

I love having the freedom to build what I want, that's completely customized for my needs. LLMs make it so easy to make changes that the barrier to entry is basically zero.

Brave new world.