Writing First, Tooling Second

I fully agree. I started blogging in December of 1999 at the same time I started writing my blogging engine. The blog was private as I wrote my blogging engine. I spent nearly two years trying to perfect it until I finally had enough and went live with what I had in October of 2001. A lot of features I wanted that were hard to design just didn't matter in the end.

Much of what I write it's just Markdown files on a Git repo. I don't even bother to generate HTML and let repo web UIs do that.

(I'm currently researching alternatives to the evil forge. I really like cgit, but it's a bit bizarre. It will render a README.md in the "about" tab, and links there will work, but for example links to directories render blank. Also of course nothing short of a forge will have an "edit this" button, which sucks a bit, because I really like edit buttons, but I don't want a full-on forge.)

I just use the lowest lift static site generator I found at the moment. I think 11ty? The fact that I'm not 100% sure is how much thought I put into the tooling. What's important is that the authoring experience is good for me (markdown files) and it's my code/infra.