Well allow me to counter with this position, based on lived experience as well as like experiences heard from friends, and observed with acquaintances.
But first, summary opinion about this and other antipatterns enumerated by OP and various commentators here:
The beauty of writing advice, like Any<Beauty>, resides in the eye of the beholder. I’d argue the question behind “patterns” v/s “antipatterns” is: Barring reasonable common law and constitutional rights+duties—and maybe the third party publishing service’s terms of use and content policies—who else ought to set editorial policy for a blog (and/or site) I personally author and operate? Why?
cat brain | # there is no such thing as a "useless cat"
cat <(lobste.rs.content.before.this) \
- \
<(lobste.rs.content.after.this)
The answer to The Question may very well converge to mtlynch’s post, which, if one shares bloggerly purpose(s) with him, is advice worth adopting (and adapting).
Alas, a writer can do only so much to please the reading public’s roving eye. The writer will almost always disappoint most of the reading public who chances upon their publication (hence your normal 90%++ bounce rate). Besides, there is no accounting for taste. LLM technology has helped many people become, um, bloggers “content creators”. A section of the content-consuming public seem to prefer the uniform predictability of Any<BeautyFactory> wordsmithy.
In my book, it is each to their own. For “whimsy” and “just because” absolutely (and inviolably) belong to the set of “editorial policies”, whether the nature of the matter discussed by the content is serious or not.
The laws of nature all but guarantee that one’s anaemic site has little or no prospect of ever becoming anything more than a dangling pointer to the lone opening post in the “apology blog post” genre (my favourite blog post genre… they are all so different in content, yet so similar in sentiment). I wager this is true of all attempts to start blogging, whether it is wordpress, or blogger, or bearblog, or ghost, or notion/obsidian, or just plain text files thrown out in a github repo.
Given that reality, I think making a custom site builder is a worthwhile yak shave in and of itself, even if it becomes an endless project to tinker with locally, and sublimates one’s blog-publication energies. Both things can be true: a person is publishing (at some blog site, or more likely skeets or xeets or slacks)… and has a forever-work-in-progress custom site builder.
Further, I feel strongly that thinking in terms of “time taken” about custom personal software is not fun—and therefore not productive! Fun is the top reason, by far, to FAFO with custom hobby projects! Better to think of the site maker in terms of a custom emacs or vim configuration, which naturally mashes up with a fun-and-games self-education about the web.
Me, I reckon I spent over six months tinkering with various static site builders, and then spent a few more months hacking together my own from scratch (100% hand-rolled, including HTML and CSS, templates as heredocs, Bash to build and hot-refesh sans javascript, pandoc to compile content to HTML, jq and xmllint to escape stuff and to validate stuff respectively).
That brings me to two more “antipatterns”.
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M+One: Using crusty prickly funny-smelling software, like Bash of all the things, to make one’s site builder.
Perl and PHP hackers of a certain vintage will roll their eyes even harder at this choice than contemporary nerds. To the lot of them I say, why not?! And I’m not alone in this as evidenced by the comments to this post: https://lobste.rs/s/70isfv/how_make_damn_website (several Persons of (shell) Culture in there :). See: “because, fun” as the prime mover of such an enterprise doomed to fail, unless much luck happens.
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M+Two: Someone pointed this out in a discord: Putting a “Part 1 of N” in the title without having the next part anywhere close to publication.
And then finally not publishing the rest, because other shiny objects became suddenly more important. The “How to make a damn website” post discussed above did not do this, but I did, in all earnestness: shite: static sites from shell (part 1/2) — feeling the html.energy. (The subsequent drafts are still on disk… yes there will be a part 3 of 2 (and maybe a couple more), if the rest of the series ever sees the light of day.)
Bonus “antipattern”, in the same category as the parent comment; i.e. you probably aren’t going to do the thing, so why bother tooling about with the machinery…
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M+Three: Including a newsletter form from the get-go.
My first newsletter email went out almost a whole year after I published my “apology genre” opener blog post, doffing one’s hat to Neal Stephenson, In the beginning, was the domain name. Unsurprisingly, that email was also an “apology genre” opener :D (excerpt below).
I dithered a long while about whether or not to include a newsletter form, with legitimate foreboding that nothing would ever happen on the site. That hesitation, I firmly believe now, was due to acquired distaste; deep misgivings absorbed by osmosis from the popular discourse about what is the appropriately nerdy way to run a nerd blog (especially a nerd blog). We nerds skew “anti-sales” / “anti-marketing”, because the counterculture signalling Force is still strong with us; viz. “Oh how self-important and self-promoting does someone have to be to do that?!”.
In fact, I rolled with the newsletter because I eventually recognised that (needlessly angsty) sentiment was nerfing my system.
October 6, 2022
Joy oh joy; a Yak was shaved, a site was published!
Hello friend!
Thank you for signing up for my “occasional newsletter” many moons ago!
Counting you, fourteen people signed up since evalapply.org first went live, late 2021. That figure is about 1,300% greater than my self-test email address, which I fully expected to still be hanging about all by itself.
A person signs up for a letter expecting one, sooner than later. I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, particularly because newsletter signups were one of the few pleasant surprises in what has been a very long dark tea time of the soul.
So, first, a wish for you…
and so on. And for more entertainment… My comment over at the corresponding HN debate documents self-owns for all the original antipatterns :sweat-smile: :D
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I think the goal of tinkering is wholly consistent with the goal of writing… these are concomitant activities in the same mode of thinking; i.e. creative production.
If one wants to publish, then all one needs to decide, is “well, I’m done with this topic”, and then publish wherever they wish to, even if one’s ultimate dream custom website remains un-shipped.
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