Letting Go of Flexibility

So you know I've been fiddling around with having a blog to publish tech related content for a long time. I used to have a Hugo based set up.

I love the idea of having as much control over the blog as possible. Ideally I'd create custom layouts and pages and have the flexibility to do whatever I wanted. Blog posts with interactive Javascript elements! Embedded 3D and 2D graphics. All the power and flexibility of the web platorm available on any page of my blog. And enough control to impose whatever structure I want on the content of the blog. Sub-sites and sub-blogs would all be possible in my ideal blogging solution.

I also love the idea of having a blog with its own aesthetic - its own design. I really like seeing hacker blogs with very unique designs (even un-designs in some cases). A part of me wants to do something really unique and expressive with the design of my blog.

All of the above still appeals to me.

But in the end I found I wasn't writing and publishing on my blog. There was too much friction in getting Hugo going and keeping it updated and thinking about all the things related to having the blog/site structure set up.

So I let go of all of those ideas. I looked into a few hosted blog platforms and selected this one. Now I can just open a web browser, go to a url and start writing and publishing.

In giving up flexibility I've freed myself to actually produce.

To get to the most important outcome.

This is an approach I probably should apply to more things.