Rebuild - how's it going?

So I'm rebuilding my website for like the umpteeth time. I'm not at all sure why I'm bothering, maybe I've got something to prove to myself now that I'm not working? Who knows? So much for the philosophy..

But at the risk of suffering from NIH Syndrome I did decide that frameworks (there are thousands of them), static site generators (there are at least dozens of them), et. al. are 'for the birds'. Why? because no matter what anyone tells you, you have to invest heavily in their learning curve, and approach every problem in their way. It's kind of like the Maslow quote: "if you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail". And frankly, over the years, that has just come to grate on me. Particularly for something as simple as a personal website - which is what we are talking about here, nothing corporate or organisational involved (otherwise we'd be talking about maintainability, language selection, future skill requirements etc..).

The other thing which has struck me recently is the longevity of all this electronic stuff (must be getting old and thinking of death I hear myself say to myself). More precisely, there is no longevity.. even though some of the stuff might last years, it is still, largely, 'emphemeral'. The tools and code you use to build something today in all likelihood will be obsolete in 5 years, especially the more specialised 'flavour of the month' type technologies. Apache (web server), PHP (scripting language) and HTML/CSS have, conversely, survived the last 30 years (at least) so I think we can be somewhat sure they'll be around for a while yet..

So that was the decision - stay on tried, proven, comparatively simple technologies, and create a platform on which to deliver the content from creative endeavour (writing, photography, coding, whatever). But, and it's a big but, this will mean every single piece of functionality will have to be build from the ground up. There's a caveat to that of course, before you knowledgeable technical purists complain, and that is there's a huge amount of 'base functionality' built into a language like PHP and the under-lying operating system, so this isn't writing like machine code or anything.. We're not in the stone age you know :-P

The upside is that each piece (of software/functionality) will do exactly what is required, no more, no less, and should, on the face of it be fairly simple as a result.

buggered if I know 😛

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