A funny short story.
I put up a poll on twitter when I redesigned the last version.
I probably should not have touched it in the first place, but I moved out of Phoenix to the very humid South and I felt the need to remove the sand dunes. So I cobbled together a basic design based on something that would have been cool but instead was extremely plain, and popped out an update in a day.
So I put out a poll - do you like it, yes or no. It was like 70% negative. I left it up for 10 years anyway.
Yes, we were years overdue for a refresh.
A couple months ago Google opened up Stitch as an AI-assisted design tool. I generated some screens with a few prompts -- hey I'm no designer. So Stitch did alright. It's not the best but it's not bad at all. I mishmash-vibed the website in my first real foray into all the agentic AI codegen tools - I used them all probably just to see what I could do. I'm currently typing this in the Cursor IDE - I like how it doesn't try to typeahead help me when I write. It's peaceful yet pretty powerful. Of course I know almost all of them are just VSCode, but I like it.
Dopefly.com had been running on a ColdFusion server since 2003 I think, then I started the blog in 2004. ColdFusion is a nice platform, a luxury SUV, but it's not free, it's not as fast as static sites, it requires specialized hosting, and the hosting I had kept having constant downtime. I was sick of it. Plus getting files up was like FTP which didn't work or a web-based file manager which sucked.
I like the idea of markdown files as pages and posts, so that was a requirement. I also need basic templating to reduce headers, and I want easy data paging, automatic files-as-pages like an old-school website but better. I want CI/CD. So I played around with a few static site generators, researching them for what I liked and how I felt.
What's the new stack?
Design by Google Stitch.
Eleventy as a static site generator. Using it feels very comfortable. Building is blazing fast, running is lightning fast. Click around. It's fast!
Markdown files as pages and blog posts.
Tailwind as the CSS framework, which honestly I'm still on the fence over - it's perhaps too powerful.
Cloudflare's free hosting - it's so fast and so brainlessly simple, deploying from Github. The level of free services for small-time devs is honestly fabulous these days.
What's next?
I have tons of content that I simply haven't written. I'm a writer. Not a great writer, but I do write a lot. Usually it's just at work, but as I'm looking at an empty nest in a couple years, I really hope writing for fun can come back into my life. I have a backlog of writing to post, at various levels of ready.
I feel the need for some lightweight blogging tools to keep track of like a hundred in-work posts, then timestamp them when I declare them done, automate slug creation, then git-push them to redeploy the site. I'm probably the only customer for this product. Anybody have something?