I thought a lot about how to create this site before I started. I knew I wanted to make it as fast as I could. I also knew I wanted to make it as easy as possible to create a new post. Generally, I think most people would reach for Wordpress or a static site generator these days. I also knew that I didn't want to deal with Wordpress either though. That left a static site generator.
Static site generators are surprisingly complex. They all seem to require you to pick a theme, at the very least. It's not clear what always goes into a theme. At the very least there's a bunch of CSS that may or not be optimized. There often also seems to be a little JavaScript to make the menus and stuff fancy. Although they should be blazing fast, a lot of the sites generated by static site generators are anything but. Even the homepages of the most popular have an FCP/LCP of about a second. Although that's well into the green side for CWVs, I want to be faster.
Which brings me to this. Instead of going with a static site generator, I decided to simply write all of the HTML by hand. Admittedly, I need to add an entry to the index every time I post something, but that seems like almost the same amount of work required to add all of the front matter to a post. There's also no theme, but all I'm doing is posting text. Most books don't really have themes either, and they seem to be readable enough. I have to add a couple of tags now and then to get formatting, but markdown isn't much better as far as the amount of typing I need to do. Adding a couple of snippets to the project and a template blog entry, and it's actually all pretty simple.
Let's hope it stays that way =)