How I Learned To Let Go And Ship It

It starts simple. You think "I know, I'll start a website!" You decide on tech, hack together or search for a simple theme and publish. "There!" you think, "We're up!"

This is exactly what I did. The initial one line post is still here. But then it begins. There a ton of stuff I still wanted to do. In the end this resulted in not doing anything for far too long. Not that I didn't do anything. I did plenty. But for a long time nobody could see it but me. And I was not producing any content.

So what did I want to do? I wanted a better theme. I quickly noticed that even though it's not hard to set up Jekyll locally, things work different between local and GitHub Pages, so I wanted a staging environment.

I wanted my staging environment to be on a subdomain. But not indexed on Google. So I had to get robots.txt working.

I wanted a workflow that reflected this. A workflow where I'd go from a staging repository to a main repository, without affecting the drafts or posts.

Speaking of drafts, I also wanted drafts to not be in a public GitHub repository, but still be on GitHub.

I was, and still am, constantly debating if I want only an apex domain, only a www subdomain, or both.

I wanted to develop locally without 'infecting' my system with Ruby. It's not that I have anything agaist Ruby, but I have a million different little projects in a million different (versions of) languages. I don't want all these to clutter my machines.

I want analytics. Nothing fancy. Preferably not Google. Really all I want is page views. If I were hosting this thing myself then I'd just grep the logs. But it's on GitHub Pages, so I'm going to have to go with a Javascript based solution.

I want categories. I want see also. I want series of posts. I want comments. I want an RSS feed. Perhaps I should do something about SEO.

Maybe I want posts in a subdirectory so that it's better for future permalinks.

And I wanted content. I wanted content ready before going live for real. So that I could schedule that.

That's a lot of things to do while also maintaining a full time job and a life. Despite COVID-19, I don't have that much free time. And to be fair, it started to look like work instead of fun. And that's how two months pass.

It isn't. Not nearly. But we're two months in and I want this thing live. So here we go. It's shipped.

I'm using a remote theme. It's okay if that breaks during development. I can see that locally. So I don't need a staging environment or a convoluted workflow.

I no longer really care about drafts. If there are any and someone sees them, then so be it.

I use Nix to keep my installation clean. I'm not yet sure how happy I am with it, but it's interesting to play with nonetheless.

And now here we are. It's live. There's still plenty of things to do. Now that I've shipped, content comes first. And all those other things? They'll come. Shipping 10% of the things you want is a lot better than never shipping at all.