Keeping this site tiny

Every couple of years I rebuild my personal site with whatever is fashionable, and every couple of years I abandon it because updating the toolchain is more work than writing. This time I tried the opposite.

The whole stack

• Plain HTML files, written in a text editor
• One stylesheet, about a hundred lines
• nginx on a small VPS, with a certificate that renews itself

That is it. No build step, no JavaScript, no analytics. A new post is a copied file with the text changed, plus one line on the index page.

What I gave up

Tags, search, and a comment section. I do not miss the first two. I sometimes miss the third, but the spam filter I used to run was more work than the occasional email.

What I got back

The site loads instantly on bad hotel Wi-Fi, and I can still open the files in ten years. Mostly, though, I write more, because there is nothing to fiddle with except the words.