I remembered that Jekyll doesn’t do a feed out of the box so I added one. The last few weeks have had some ups and downs, including a mystery illness that hung on. I’ve spent a lot of time on website stuff because the declutter process I undertook in March pointed me to a few things I’ve just taken to calling “purposes,” including writing and photography, and I had very little creative energy but plenty of nervous energy.
Building websites has been a small distraction from a bunch of things … something to do with my hands. I think I ended up picking Jekyll because its plain-text, command line, git-deployed nature is an experience I’d call tactile. It is soothing to me to figure out Liquid syntax, dink around with HTML, and try out deployment pipelines. Code, preview, tweak, reload, iterate, wonder, dig, tweak, reload, etc.
But it is also a distraction. Building websites isn’t really one of my purposes. It’s just a way to platform my purposes. So the danger for someone like me, who can sometimes defer unease or anxiety by going into the crystalline world of tech stuff, is that I’ll slowly begin to confuse my purpose with my tools.
So I decided to write this post to say to myself, “I added a feed, I like the way the galleries work, I have category pages, the whole GitHub-to-Cloudflare deployment pipeline ‘just works,’ and I’ve made a basic editorial calendar that goes out six weeks. So I can put this down for now, call it v1, and get on with it serving my purposes.” That’s what it’s here for. That is its purpose.