I used to put my thoughts into a self-hosted WordPress site — both to write and to play with the whole LAMP stack. After some years it just took more time than I had. I tried to revive it multiple times but wasn’t willing to swing over to full centralized control of the content. Then the static site movement gained momentum and I started evaluating things. Everything. Then I settled on a system and started making it perfect.
Years went by and all I had to show for it were some text files with aspirations and ideas in my head. Not because I lack technical skill. Not because I lack the ability to write cogently. Not because I lack the time. I spent my time doing things without doing anything.
So I took a step. I purchased a domain for myself. Then I took another step and started with someone else’s static site — ripped out the boilerplate, put up the simplest version I could show in public. Then I wrote this post.
That was the whole trick, really. Getting out of my head and all the things I know and use every day at work and going back to a beginner’s mind. What is the simplest thing I need to do to focus on a writing platform that I control? For me that was version control, a static site generator, a domain, and some scripts that automatically publish when I commit new changes.
Everything else — the laboratory to play with cool things, the demo area to showcase what I’m proud of, whatever else may strike my fancy — can be built in iterative cycles. Because it all starts with a single step.
