Changes
What is it about personal websites? I want to have them, but I can't seem to keep them updated.
Lots has happened with me creatively since the last time I posted here. Three or four more live music performances, a few music videos, several music live streams, some hand-painted AI-influenced art. It's been my busiest year creatively in six or seven years, yet this journal site I created to report on my creative activities has been idle.
I used to post more on social media as well, but as my old favorite Twitter burns to the ground and potential replacements take hold, my social media presence has changed. I occasionally post creative notes to Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, and more rarely Facebook and Instagram, but not here on my very own creative journal. It's just not a habit.
But I still want to have personal websites. Tinkering with the technology behind them is a hobby.
So where do I go from here?
Site Generator
First, I'm changing my website generator. I've been using the Jekyll static site generator for a few years. While I'm sold on the concept of static site generators instead of content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal, Jekyll just wasn't the best choice for me.
And by that I mean Jekyll's reliance on Ruby. I never got along with Ruby. It's not widely used, it's quirky, and it's dissimilar to every other programming language I know. It just wasn't worth the effort to struggle with Ruby to customize Jekyll. So Jekyll is out.
To get away from Jekyll and Ruby, I'm switching to Eleventy. It's another fairly popular static site generator. It's similar to Jekyll in many ways, but instead of Ruby it can be customized using Javascript and Nodejs. While Javascript isn't the best of programming languages, it happens to be one I've used in other projects the last few years. So some of the things I wanted to do with my old sites but couldn't thanks to Ruby, will now be within the realm of possibility with Javascript.
Source Control
I currently use git with a locally-hosted git server for source code control, along with some custom shell scripts to deploy my web sites to my web host.
I'm retiring the local git server and replacing it with github. My web site source will be in the cloud in private github repositories. This simplifies my local development environment, and having the source on github opens some new possibilities.
Web Hosting
I'm changing my web hosting from Dreamhost to Cloudflare Pages. Dreamhost has been very reliable, highly performant, and easy to use. I highly recommend it. So why change?
Cloudflare Pages integrates with github and Eleventy to automatically build and deploy my website whenever I push a code change to the main branch on github. Dreamhost can't do that without a bunch of custom scripting.
I surveyed web hosts with equivalent capabilities, but for my situation with several small personal web sites, Cloudflare Pages will do it for free. I've been paying for a premium hosting plan at Dreamhost that I originally needed, but has been under-utilized since I switched to using static sites. Why keep paying for something I haven't been using and doesn't do all the things I really want now?
Domains
The final change I'm working toward is yet another repurposing of my domains. I'm still thinking through exactly how I want it to look in the end, but in the past couple of years I've retired a few domains that no longer made sense for me, and started one new one. I'm not sure whether this website remains as a creative journal for all my creative pursuits, or if it narrows in focus to its roots as a photography blog, or something else entirely.
But no matter. The bots will continue to index and probe this and my other sites, and maybe an occasional human will find their way here too.
In total, these changes will simplify my local development environment and save me a couple hundred a year in hosting costs. They won't necessarily make me update the sites more frequently, but removing a few little speed bumps helps.