the best way to get started is to do it yourself

I thought it would be appropriate to start this blog off by writing a bit about what powers it. It lives on Github Pages (you can find all of this site there), but if you do some snooping around in the code you'll find some very strange looking html files. For example, this page you're on right now is the product of the following source page:

<pagelayout>
    <md>
        <!-- markdown stuff -->
    </md>
</pagelayout>

Anyone familiar with html will know that those tags don't exist. So how is this site working?

Existing Solutions

I've always wanted to host a site over the years, so I've tried many of the options there are out there, and found them all lacking in one way or another. Some of my favourites were:

Bear Blog - I love this one so much, but its simplicity is also its drawback, as I can't do everything I want to do.
Quartz - This one was very attractive, as I store as much stuff as I can in a large Obsidian vault (this post is being written in it right now), but as nice as it would be to be able to publish straight out of it, it'd take a really good understanding of the codebase before I could customise it to the degree I wanted.
React + Next.js - This one almost stuck (this current site is a port of that attempt to plain html), I just didn't like how bloated it felt for what I wanted out of it.

Being able to play with different platforms felt good and fun, but ultimately it wasn't moving me any closer to actually having a blog with content. It allowed me to feel productive without doing anything. So a week ago I set out to go and make my own site engine.

Requirements

I had a decently good idea of what I wanted from any possible solution:

Web Components - I liked using components in React. I didn't use them for any sort of reactivity (hence the feeling of bloat), but it was really nice to be able to define something I could reuse again and again, especially if I could pass it props. I know that "official" Web Components exist, but I decided I didn't like them enough to use them.
MathJax - I like maths. It's only a matter of time until I start writing posts which need formulas.
Markdown Posts - This was more optional than the others, but I love markdown as a format.
Simplicity - This is crucial. Not only do I want full control, I want full understanding as well. The less I understand something, the harder it is to use, and the less I want to use it.

I ended up deciding to write in plain HTML, CSS, and js. However, anyone who's written html by hand before knows it can be a pain, so I wrote my own build script (which supports all of those criteria above): builder: a small python build script to populate html templates.

What does it do?

As of now (development is ongoing, and it'll presumably remain that way as long as I keep working on that site), it lets you do the following:

Define, use and render templates - For example, the <pagelayout> block above is simply a wrapper for the rest of my site (header and such), and puts whatever is inside it in the <body> tags.
Render Markdown - With a bit of help from the markdown-it-py library, all text between <md> tags gets converted from Markdown to HTML at build time, letting me write in markdown and paste into my html after.
Generate an RSS Feed - generate a feed of whatever posts you want, wherever you want. This site has one here.

Finally, I have a system I where I can balance writing posts with writing code for the site, and both are equally enjoyable. A system that I completely understand, and don't have to spend hours reading docs to do anything mildly complicated. A system that won't lock me in, or break unexpectedly, or randomly be deprecated. A system that is built for me, by me.

It'll always take more effort to make something yourself, but it'll always be more rewarding when you can see the end product, and know that you wrote every line of it.