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August 2, 2026

6 min read

I Rebuilt My Blog for the Fifth Time

#meta #writing

This site has been a hand-rolled PHP mess, a WordPress theme, a Gatsby app with 41 plugins, a half-finished Next.js migration, and now — finally — a pile of static HTML. Five rewrites in eight years. I want to talk about why that happened, and why I think it's over.

The rewrite trap

Every rewrite started the same way: I'd sit down to write a post, notice something small that annoyed me, and three hours later I'd have a branch called new-site and zero new writing. The tooling was more fun than the work. Rebuilding a blog feels like productivity because it produces visible output, but the output nobody asked for.

The tell, looking back, is that not one rewrite was prompted by a reader. Nobody ever emailed me to say the fonts loaded too slowly. I was the only audience for the engineering, and I was a very demanding customer.

What each version taught me

I don't regret the rewrites individually — each one taught me something I still use:

  • The PHP version taught me how servers actually work, because mine kept falling over
  • WordPress taught me that other people's abstractions have other people's priorities
  • Gatsby taught me GraphQL, and also that I did not need GraphQL to render 40 markdown files
  • The Next.js version taught me to read the bill before deploying

The lesson that took five versions to land: the stack was never the problem. The posts I'm proudest of were written in the ugliest versions of this site. The debugging guide went out on a theme I actively disliked, and it's still the most-read thing here.

What the site runs on now

Markdown in a folder, a build script that fits on one screen, and static files on a CDN. Deploys take nine seconds. There is no database, no hydration, and nothing to update on a Sunday night.

$ ls -la
total 48
-rw-r--r--  build.sh
drwxr-xr-x  posts/
drwxr-xr-x  public/

Is it less capable than what it replaced? Enormously. It also hasn't broken once, and every capability I lost was one I wasn't using.

The actual point

If you have a side project that keeps getting rebuilt instead of used, the rebuild is probably the hobby — and that's fine, as long as you're honest about it. I wanted the writing to be the hobby. So this is the last rewrite. If you're reading this in 2030 on the same design: I made it.

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