I started blogging around this time two years ago and one of the things I've found is that having just a little pressure to have something interesting to share can be a good motivator in getting things done. With my final semester of school just now starting and wanting to finish strong, one of the things I've been thinking about stepping up is my blogging efforts. This is just an experiment and I'll start to back off if it gets to be too much, but I'm hopeful that setting goals to share more will be a good motivator.
I'll go into more detail below, but here's the gist:
Neocities is great. The main thing is that I was starting to want my own domain, and I took this as an opportunity to completely redo my site with a static site generator. I was maintaining my Neocities site almost entirely by hand, including the RSS feed (don't do that). I didn't think it was a big deal at first but you can guess how old that quickly started to get.
I'm using Hugo to generate the new site and deploying to Vercel. I've chosen a theme based on Bear Blog and slightly customized it. I've based the dark theme on the Tokyo Night color scheme and the light theme on Nord.
The best thing about the theme is how minimal and lightweight it is. The initial page load is ~50 kB since I'm using a couple custom fonts, but page loads after that are closer to 3-5 kB.
I'm still planning on writing for gemini first and then porting to the web. This will be way easier now that my website is written in markdown. All I have to do is change the link format, everything else is identical between gemini formatting and markdown.
A new site on its own wouldn't be much of a motivator, so starting with this post I'm going to be attempting #100DaysToOffload.
It's a challenge to make 100 posts to a personal blog over the course of a year. That works out to one post every 3-4 days which I think is a perfect goal -- high enough to push myself but not so high where it'll be a burden.
- moddedBear / 2022-01-10