Starting Fresh

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Over the past two years or so I think I have tried to rewrite my personal site about 3 or 4 times. Each time with the same goal of making a simple blogging platform that gets out of the way and just lets me focus on the writing.

Since I find myself with two weeks off of work and its the end of the year / beginning of the next year I figured I would go for another rewrite this time with the long term goal of doing the following:

• Get the bootstrapping work out of the way and focus on the writing
• Use this as an opportunity to test out personal projects like native-bundler and reroute
• Be easy to setup and get running with simple additions as I go forward (i.e. scale out from an initial product)

Where to start?

A few months ago I was planning on kicking off this rewrite within the same repo and site that I have currently, I started by updating to emotion v10, swapping react-router for reach router and changing all my old content from markdown to mdx.

This was all too much work to do as part of a rewrite and I begin to question the benefit of doing such a task.

I decided the other day that it would be a lot simpler to just drop all the current infrastructure I had around my previous blog and just start fresh.

My hope is that without all the technical debt the previous site had, I could get this one into a decent spot without much work and focus on the writing.

So this new site is built using a node build script around 150 lines in total, building off of the awesome work around the MDX language spec, babel, prettier, and even eval!

What to do next

• Port over some of the front pages from my current site