I'm back! Again! Wow!

I've shed all of the weight of all of the various content management systems I've tried over the past year. I really thought that using something built for managing a website would be really cool and make everything easier, but I was so very very wrong.

Everything that I tried just sucked in different ways. Either it was too involved, or it was designed for nothing like what I wanted to do. I've even given up on using databases for storing content. We're all flat files now, bucko. I'm really disappointed at how complex even the most simple web things are! I understand that maybe they're designed for people to create sites with that they can hand off to clients, but even still the amount of things that can break from the slightest misstep even in the simplest content management systems is unreal.

I've been thinking a lot about a lot of stuff over the past year or so, so I want to make sure that I have a good lookin' website again to write on. I still don't know how to end blog posts. So this is it. The end of the post.

Okay so I know I was supposed to get back to posting stuff here but... I'm still not happy with the system I have set up. I tried out this thing called Pico CMS which is like the lightest weight blog whatever system that I could find, but it's still super complex and annoying. To customize any part of it I still have to dig through a bunch of files and configs and the php code running it all is a gigantic nightmare.

So I think I'm just going to scrap it and go back to some super simple php thing I write myself but make it as simple as possible and just parse markdown files for all the entries which is essentially but Pico does but there's a lot of weird snags that I'm having trouble navigating for my use cases.

I know that I don't really get a lot of, or any, comments on my posts usually, but it would be nice to have some sort of comment system set up that wasn't relying on hacking through Pico's code, or some super bloated commenting service like Disqus or whatever. It's pretty wild how even the most simple things on the web are still convoluted nightmares. Now I'm off to google search some php questions that were answered on stack overflow 15 years ago!

There are a lot of things to still figure out. I guess that is always the case.

I get into a habit of thinking way too much about what to write here. I still think of it as some sort of super official presentation of myself, so I tend to be very careful about what to share, but then I get stuck in an infinite loop of thinking about something, but then it never important enough to write about! I must break the cycle of despair.

Obviously my online presence has changed a lot in the past few years. I used to be very active on my blog and trying to write about what I was up to at least three times a week, but after a very long time of doing that it became very exhausting. I also came to dread the feeling of being behind on my posts, and frantically always trying to catch up. I know that this kept me somewhat productive and "on task" but it was also a big contributor to anxiety and feeling like I was never doing enough.

After I started treating my anxiety and ADHD issues, a lot of my perspectives changed. I pretty much gave up on the multiple posts a week thing, but then over time I eventually decided to retire the concept of my blog entirely. I came to a realization that things like updating my blog all the time and maintaining a strong-ish online presence was a form of managing my mental illnesses. Not to say that I was exclusively behaving in certain ways as coping mechanisms, but there has definitely been a significant change since starting on focused therapy and medication.