For the last few weeks, I’ve fallen out with myself and the place I publish all of my things online. I don’t want to go into the specifics, but I turned back from the brink not that long ago and don’t want to again. As such, I’ve been learning to build my own static blog with 11ty. It’s slow-going, but that’s the point.

If I am honest with myself, hosting my blog and everything else with micro.blog is the easy way to do it, but making me find solutions for things forces me to readdress my desires. It is easy for me to point at things like micropub, webmentions and the like, but when I have to do work to implement them I have to be certain what I want to achieve.

Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? That was my initial reaction too, and there might be some conformation bias going on, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it makes. Out of the box, 11ty is powerful, but has a high barrier to entry. There are starter themes to clone and get you going, but to really take advantage of what it can do takes time and knowledge. Knowledge I barely have.

I managed to get a rudimentary CMS up and working, along with permalinks working the way I want to, but after a few hours of head scratching really in-depth features were lacking. Easy enough to just give up again, but these technical skill barriers are there to be solved. It made me think about how easy it is to yell for a feature on a platform, but when you have to build it yourself it’s a different story. The barrier prompts internal decisions that might never arrive.

It also made me laugh at some points where I have jumped into ‘new’ features without actually thinking about how they help and how useful they are. Ultimately, I’m willing to do the work to get the features I want, such as webmentions, but some are falling away. As I spoke about before, this is supplementing my current front end certificate, so it’s win/win at the moment.