It's weird to think about, and I'm not sure how many of my friends/readers¹ were aware of it at the time, but my very first blog back in the day (early 2000s) was entirely hand-rolled.

I was using it as a way to build some web development chops that I wasn't really getting at school.² I was pretty proud of it, even though it wasn't really production ready. I did the style sheets and themes from scratch. I built my own "CMS" (emphasis on the scare-quotes) to write posts with: a little MySQL database to store posts in, PHP code to retrieve them, update an RSS feed, a little basic web form to do the editing with. Even the commenting capabilities were built by yours truly.

The whole thing was hideously brittle and almost certainly riddled with security flaws. But hey, it predated Wordpress (which I eventually migrated to).

It's been sort of a revelation working with Zola and the concept of a "static" website. Way back when I built all of the above, it was because the idea of having to manage things statically felt totally untenable due to scaling issues. But Zola (and Hugo and Jekyll etc.) are more like "compilers" for websites. You write source files (Markdown), and then basically call "make": then your entire content tree is rebuilt. No dynamic content is necessary. Though I wonder about how one would implement a commenting system; I suppose via some magic in the templates. But I oppose the existence of a comment section as a matter of philosophy these days, so I don't need to worry.³

Anyway, to my programmer brain this process makes so very much sense and seems obvious in hindsight. And since my web host provides a build service, the whole thing is actually just a Git pipeline. Even if the post count entered the bajillions and it actually somehow took some non-trivial amount of time to "compile" the site, well, whatever: Who cares how long it actually takes? From my point of view it's still git push and forget.

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1. If you were reading back then (or now, for that matter) it probably means you are my friend. Otherwise, why would you even? ↩

2. This was a very wise, prescient, future-looking thing for a young go-getter looking for a career in development to do in 2002. Yet I pretty soon thereafter decided I loathed pretty much everything about web development and now I'm just a dinosaur anyway. ↩

3. There's a little joke in the footer about "disabling" comments, but that's a lie. There was never a comment feature in my theme to begin with. ↩