Grown Locally, Served Statically
I might be a diary person after all. Long before the Internets, blogs and computers, back in middle school—deep in my melodramatic, “edgy” phase—I bought diaries to hurl words onto paper. What does a middle school boy write about? I’ll leave that to your imagination. The one line I do remember: escape this environment and go live in Japan. Back then my Japan was built from anime and manga; having actually made the move, I can say this much—the real thing is even tougher, and even better.
Maybe that’s why today’s blog is just a the same diary with different tools. Paper and pen became a screen and a keyboard.
The road here was long. About twenty years ago I started with some very security-compromised CGI, tinkered with MovableType, and eventually found WordPress. Along the way I paid a local hosting provider zillions of yen for who-knows-how-many years. I’ll gladly pay for my own domain, but annual hosting fees started to feel a bit silly.
So I fell for this idea: keep the CMS local, publish statically. Nurture drafts at home; release something lean and fast to the wild.
Here’s the current setup:
Manage WordPress locally with LocalWP
Export static pages via Simply Static
Deploy on Google Firebase
Commit everything to Git
It’s a lot of steps, but the ritual is strangely satisfying. I guess I’m a command-line person at heart; I grew up on an IBM PC/AT, hammering dir/w every three seconds, while pandering my way around Sierra OnLine adventure grames.
Both the paper diary and today’s digital version are places to think at my own pace. Develop ideas locally; deliver them lightly as static pages. For now, that distance feels just right for me.