So we’re already on astrid.tech v2, despite the fact that the footer still says v1. However, I’m feeling like my website is not very flexible anymore, and I want to redesign.

Why the hell do I want to redesign my website again? There are a couple reasons.

1. My current setup is inflexible, hacked-together, and shitty. It would be quite a pain to add a new post type, like a note, recipe, or a RSVP, or other things that IndieWeb people post.

2. My website is somewhat bloated. JavaScript makes up a whopping 300 KB of stuff downloaded on the homepage! I want to cut down on that value.

3. I want to connect my website with other services. For instance, I want to syndicate my posts to Twitter, Mastodon, or other services, and syndicate other data back onto my website automatically, and to do that would require a bunch of additional code. I also want to send and receive webmentions, and in a less-janky way than I have now.

The only question now is, what am I going to use to redesign my website? I have a couple of criteria in considering this.

• I like having my posts and content being markdown files in a Git repository. It makes everything editor-agnostic and avoids pitfalls with database storage of posts.
• I like statically-typed languages over dynamically-typed languages.
• I’m interested in trying something new. Maybe a wacky functional or functional-ish language, like Scala, which I’m familiar with, or Haskell or Rust, which I’ve never used before.
• Keeping my 8000 LOC of React would be great, but I may just have to end up throwing it out. Oh well.

There are a couple of decisions I can make.

• Go fully dynamic. This would make programming complicated stuff a bit easier, but it would leave my website possibly prone to attacks. I have a couple of options for doing this.
  • Extend my Python/Django API server. This would be an easy option, but I honestly don’t like Python all that much because it’s a dynamically-typed language.
  • Extend my Rust/Rocket link shortener. Rust is also pretty cool, though I’m not too familiar with it. I could just build off of my link shortener, though.
  • Fuck it, brand new server! I could write a new server in Scala. I heard they also improved the compile times since I last used it 6 years ago. It also has pretty good tooling.
• Stay with the strange static/dynamic thing. To receive webmentions and webhooks and comments, after all, I will need a running server.
  • Go back to Gatsby. It’s an appealing option; Gatsby includes more batteries for blog sites than Next.js. But then again, I do want to try something new.
  • Write my own static site generator! This has been in the works for a while. I’m experimenting with writing one in Haskell right now. Unfortunately, I’m shit at Haskell, so it’s going about as well as you’d expect.

I think it’s still possible to preserve some of my React libraries and UI, though. I would just serve it as custom elements.