About Why I’m Not Doing That

In researching options for restarting my blog, I looked first at WordPress. WordPress is an obvious choice for a blog. It also makes good sense for my professional development. At work I am responsible for a couple of WordPress websites. I need to understand the workings and shepherd the development of these websites. Having my own WordPress blog would allow me to get in the necessary reps.

Ultimately, I decided against WordPress. To run it, I need a host. A host will cost money – not a lot of money, but some. I don’t want the cost or the complication of purchasing and managing a hosting service just for a little blog. Since I already have website hosted with AWS, hosting WordPress meant using LightSail. That’s a hassle I don’t want. I’m not doing that.

Then I looked at Nuxt. Nuxt was interesting to me because it’s based on Vue.js. I like Vue.js. I could use more practice developing with Vue.js. I thought Nuxt would allow me to build a blog while getting some reps with Vue. Unfortunately, I ran into the problem of wanting to do something simple with tools that are unnecessarily complicated. I’m already involved in a project where React is being used as the proverbial hammer where a fly swatter would suffice. Why would I want do that for my own project? Why would anyone?

Developers like to use what they’re familiar with. If you know React, it might make sense to you to use React for static site generation. If you are good with Vue.js, using Nuxt might seem like the right way to go. But I’m a simple-minded front-end developer. I could build a blog with a quick Node.js script but I am hoping for something a tad more elegant. But there’s a difference between a little more elegant and using some big JavaScript framework do build a simple blog. Why would I want all that unneceesary tooling? I’m not doing that.

I don’t like unnecessary dependencies. When you begin with Nuxt or React, the first thing npm does is download a million packages. There’s a dependency tree the size of a Sequoia. There's no way I would untangle a problem on my own if something in that chain of dependencies breaks down. When I first installed Nuxt, it gave me a bunch of errors – without me having done anything at all – because of some node package named colorette. What the hell is that? Why do I need it? Who the heck knows.

So I’ve decided to try using Eleventy. Even though it also triggers an avalanche of node package downloads on install, it seem simple enough. It took me a few hours to solve for the simple setup that I want for a blog. That’s all I need. I want to blog, not get bogged down researching a framework. I can do that some other time.