okay now it's time to do the mental math on what will be faster, remembering how to use the last SSG i learned to use, remembering how to use the last html templating system i learned to use, writing the world's smallest ssg in 6 lines of python by parsing a toml file, or just writing html by hand
about every six months i think of a thing i need to do with my web presence, and the thought passes through my mind "oh— this would be a good opportunity to learn nextjs". and then i do not do it
like, i mean "i don't learn nextjs" but i also mean "i do not do whatever my web maintenance task is". checking my wordpress comment queue to see if any spam got through has become an anxiety trigger
Okay I dug up the repo from the last time I generated a website from a template engine and apparently the tool I used was named "eleventy". Seriously, Past Andi?
Basically my problem is that somehow my neurons are wedged in such a way if I learn Eleventy I'll forget how to use it by the next time I need it, if I learn Pelican I'll forget how to use it same, if I learn Flexbox i'll forget how to use it same, if I learn CSS I'll forget how to use it same. But I'm always, always going to have the way to solve any given layout problem with pre-CSS HTML table tags rising to mind. Apparently I learned HTML tables at the absolute peak of my neural plasticity
I have learned at least twenty programming languages after the date when I learned HTML tables, and THOSE I don't have any trouble remembering, but CSS? No, sorry, I've got nothing.
On the other hand maybe rather than this being a problem with me, the problem is just that every time in my life I've needed to center an element using CSS the way to do it has changed since the last time?
@mcc I feel this - my website is still hand-written HTML. I do find jinja2/nunjucks sympathetic when I do need to make templated pages from data though. Hugo has some elegance but it is very much a "how did I solve this last time?" problem.
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