Introduction to This Blog

I'm so tired of static site generators. Making a single change to a website shouldn't require us to push it through the entire CI pipeline every time. Our extremely short attention span makes us despise long iterations and feedback loops. Also, because we don't really use a laptop for any development work, a phone is the only device we carry all the time.

So we decided to write a blog engine in Rust. Sure, it's not particularly an outstanding achievement, but it's ours. This allows us to write this post from the comfort of our bed :3

We'll get into the technical details when we have something interesting, but currently the website is entirely rendered on the server, except the management UI having some JavaScript. Since our website is tiny both in terms of traffic and compute load, a single SQLite database is more than enough for all our uses. Currently, the dynamic parts of the website include this blog, the 88x31 buttons in the footer, and the gallery images.

There's no JavaScript build system to reduce the complexity of building and setting up the website. It should always only need one binary to execute. We've decided to go entirely frameworkless, because it turns out the development experience of importing libraries kinda sucks. Import maps are not very supported by our IDE, and using CDNs is out of the question for privacy leakage reasons. All media is static hosted by the server for the same reason.

There's a lot to be desired, mainly in the polish department, and we need to do proper cache control, yet we're excited to have something that feels rewarding enough to use, even if it's just CRUD with some Markdown on top.