I have no trouble writing. Give me a topic I care about and I’ll have two thousand words before the coffee gets cold. Chatbot history, planning systems, all kinds of posts that looked bigger from the outside than they felt on the page.
Getting them onto the internet in a way that doesn’t make me want to close the tab took four platforms in four months.
Hugo + PaperMod #
First attempt was the obvious one. Hugo, PaperMod theme, Cloudflare Pages. Site was up in under an hour. It looked fine. It looked like every other developer blog. Same sidebar, same card layout, same “hey I also have a dark mode toggle” energy.
I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t feel anything about it, which is worse. Two commits in, I was already shopping for something else. That should have told me this wasn’t about the theme.
Emdash #
Then I overcorrected. Hard. Emdash was a real CMS: Astro, admin panel, server rendering, database, the whole respectable grown-up stack. I built the whole thing out. Routes, categories, tags, search, RSS.
It was the kind of system where every innocent assumption turned out to be wrong in a new and creative way, and I kept fixing things anyway because the architecture was interesting.
It was a CMS when all I needed was a blog. But I wasn’t ready to admit that yet, because “just a blog” felt too simple for the amount of energy I was putting into this.
Quartz 4 #
Quartz caught my eye because it felt like it was built for the way I think. Atomic notes, backlinks, a knowledge graph that shows how things connect. I was already writing in Obsidian, so the pipeline was natural. Write in the vault, push to git, the site builds itself.
This is the one I kept polishing long enough to mistake momentum for commitment. Custom color scheme, custom typography, styled tag pills, glow effects on hover. The writing experience was the best of any platform I tried. And the output was genuinely good for notes.
It never felt like a blog, though. It felt like publishing my notebook, which isn’t the same thing. A notebook says “here’s what I’m thinking.” A blog says “here’s what I think.” The difference matters more than I expected.
Back to Hugo #
So I came back to Hugo. Different theme, Blowfish this time. Monospace type, dark background, flat post listings. The kind of stripped-down look that felt closer to what I actually wanted.
“Closer” was not “done.” I spent more time this week adjusting the homepage layout, swapping nav links, and arguing with Cloudflare Workers about environment variables than I spent writing. The build broke because the theme expected data files I didn’t have. I looked at Julia Evans’ site and said “yeah, that” and then spent an hour writing a custom template to match the feel.
I could have been writing a post during that hour. Instead I was choosing between fit-content(120px) and auto for a CSS grid column. And I was enjoying it, which is the part that should concern me.
What’s Actually Going On #
At some point it became hard to ignore that the technical problems were not, in fact, the thing keeping posts unpublished.
The tooling was never the problem. Hugo is fast. Blowfish is flexible. Cloudflare deploys in seconds. All of these platforms worked. I kept leaving anyway.
Here’s what I didn’t want to say out loud: I was using platform changes to avoid publishing. Every replatform felt productive. New repo, new config, new theme to learn. It had all the texture of real work without the vulnerability of putting words in front of people. Choosing fonts is safe. Hitting publish is not.
But there’s something else underneath that, and it’s weirder. Every blogging tool forces you to decide what kind of public self you’re building. Card layout or flat list. Casual or polished. Digital garden or essay collection. Those aren’t just design choices. They’re identity choices. Engineers love calling things subjective right before spending six hours obsessing over them.
That’s why this took four platforms and four months. The writing was always done. What wasn’t done was figuring out what I wanted to look like on the internet.
The site finally feels like mine. Not because I found the right tool. Because I stopped treating the scaffolding as a prerequisite for the writing and started treating it as something that grows alongside it.