Old Look, New Blog
As much as Ghost appealed to me as a WordPress-like, batteries-included blogging option, it had the unfortunate shortcoming of never being appealing for me to use. I hated logging into it, the Docker image was always somehow hobbled (something with paths... whatever), and it felt overall too heavy.
I decided to go back to basics, bring in a little '90s to the design, and run a setup that's appealing enough to me to prompt me to write from time to time. The new system is based on eleventy, which is a nice little static site generator with very patchy documentation but a wonderful operating philosophy. SSGs are the kind of thing that you almost should just write yourself so you can get the five features you care about and not have to dodge the other 95 you don't (here's looking at you, Hugo). So, with a few hours of fighting the system, then fighting the configuration system, then struggling with Python Unicode encoding of my twenty-ish (!) years of blog history, we're up and running to some extent.
So many blogs have a post like this on top where it says, "I'm looking forward to writing more," and I'm hoping this is a means of pushing that post down the history a bit with new content.