Personal Blogging
Published on Dec 08 2025
Personal Blogging
In June 2020, I found myself with a surplus of free time (we all know why). To fight the boredom, I decided to finally start a blog.
It sounded simple enough, but what started as a quick project turned into a multi-year journey through the landscape of web development tools.
Ghost CMS
Initially, I spun up an instance of Ghost.
Don't get me wrong, Ghost is an awesome framework. It offers a sleek writing experience and excellent features right out of the box. But for a simple personal blog, it felt like absolute overkill.
It was too heavy. Too commercial. Potentially too expensive. I abandoned it in less than a week.
Jekyll
To strip things down, I moved to Jekyll. I did this in part because I needed something much more lightweight, and I was inspired by a friend of mine who had one.
This was my introduction to the world of Static Site Generators (SSG). The logic was refreshing: you write Markdown files, run a build command, and the computer spits out raw HTML, CSS, and JS files. No database, no backend, just files you can host anywhere for free. I picked GitHub Pages to host mine.
Jekyll served me well for over 5 years (2020-2025). It’s kind of the grandfather of SSGs and has a massive ecosystem. However, I don't feel any particular attachment to it. I spun up the same template my friend was using called Minimal Mistakes and just sort of went with it. I also don't know Ruby at all. So much of the underlying framework of Gemfiles, etc. are a mystery to me.
Current Stack: PEA
I'm sure someone else has invented this but I decided to go with my own stack: PEA
Today, this blog runs on this exact stack.
11ty is a simpler, faster alternative written in JavaScript. It creates zero-client-side JavaScript by default and compiles your site incredibly fast. It feels flexible in a way other generators don't—it doesn't force a specific structure on you.
To style it, I decided to avoid the more common Tailwind or Boostrap and went with Pico CSS.
Pico CSS is a minimal CSS framework for semantic HTML. It styles standard HTML elements (<h1>, <p>, <button>) beautifully without requiring me to add a half dozen classes to my markup. It keeps the code clean and readable.
The combination of 11ty + Pico CSS is the perfect balance for me: speed, efficiency, simplicity.
Finally, adding Alpine.js gives me javascript in a lightweight package. Allowing for things like this incredible, powerful ... incrementer. I don't actually have a need for any JS yet, but if/when I do this is what I have loaded up for it.