The main blog on this domain is just a bunch of html files. Why not use a more modern approach? Work should be done with the right tools, and not using standard types of equipment (see image) seems like a bad sign about someone’s experience and/or competence, right?

There are now many tools that can generate blogs from Markdown files. They can automatically add styling, index pages, and so on. Notable examples are Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, and Astro.

I tried Jekyll a while back, and decided that

• It didn’t have the flexibility for some things I wanted to do on my site.
• It wasn’t actually easier than using things to make individual html files directly.
• I didn’t like the aesthetics of Jekyll sites I saw at the time.
• I didn’t want to deal with Ruby.

By the way, see how there’s some space before the list there? I didn’t add that, the software just added it for me, and I can’t easily remove it. Thanks.

At that time, Eleventy and Astro didn’t even exist yet. Astro was first released in 2021; if it existed when I first started my blog, maybe I would’ve used it. It has adequate flexibility, but doing anything besides the basic formatting of Markdown involves writing either html files or adding html to the Markdown files. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly easier for me than what I’ve been doing; it just has extra features available…at the cost of a lot of complexity and dependencies.