Take the easy path
Easy path: the choice or decision that involves less barriers than the hard path but leads to the same desired outcome
I do not have any specific New Year’s resolutions but a New Year’s theme: to be generous (topic for another day). I do, however, have specific visions for different aspects of my life and goals to help move myself towards those visions. One of the visions I have is to be a consistent writer. The goal I have to push myself towards consistency is to write at least two blog posts a month. While I had plenty of ideas for what to write about, I did have a dilemma of sorts: my existing personal website was not fun to publish content in.
Making life hard for myself
I previously used Hugo to statically generate my website. It had a sleek theme, was performant, and everything was in Markdown, the most enjoyable format for me to write content for a website. That’s where all the practical benefits end. All the code was hosted in a Git repository on GitHub and deployed to the web using Netlify. For quick iteration on the site, I could view my changes on a local dev server, but to see changes live, I would need to push a commit and wait for the auto-deploy to complete to view them. Configuring the site and messing with the theme was fun and all, but it was distracting me from what I wanted to do: write. Would it not be nice if I could write what I wanted, paste the content somewhere, and see it on my website immediately?
Finding an easy path
One option for an easy path was to choose a popular blogging platform like Medium. Content is the focus of Medium blogs, and it would be frictionless to upload content and view it. The downside, though, is that Medium blogs look the same. I did like how my old website looked and wanted my site to have personality, even if it was not an original theme made by me.
I eventually stumbled upon Bear which is what is powering the website you are reading this post on. It had what I wanted:
- Themes to make the website look good (plus customization options through CSS)
- Easy to upload Markdown content and post, including seeing live drafts quickly
- Configuration was simple
I no longer have to worry about managing a Git repository, deployments, or code changes for the theme. All I need to do is write.
The lesson
My previous website was admittedly pretty fun to have worked on, and I was proud of it, but it did not satisfy my goal of wanting to write for the Internet. If my goal was to develop my own personal blog from scratch, it would have made more sense. The hard path made it difficult to reach my goal, but taking the easy path made it, well, easy!