lol.systems

Hello friend. It's been a while. The other day I was thinking to myself how I wish I had a blog instead of dumping my stream of thought into a series of Github gists. The reason I originally purchased the lol.systems domain was to have a place to write about random stuff, share ideas, and code. Since I bought this domain in 2016 it's sat with stale content. Well.. I'm finally ready to show the domain some love and decided to build a blog from scratch.

New blog stack

Back in the day this blog was built using Hugo, which is still widely used today. I always felt that Hugo was clunky, and just not a good fit for me. Still, Hugo was a better alternative than having to maintain something like WordPress with daily high severity plugin or theme vulnerabilities that need patching. Vulnerabilities.. and tons of community drama. WordPress doesn't feel like a great option in 2025.

With Hugo I could never find a template that I wanted to use, even though there are many. Something about Hugo just didn't feel like I was building something but rather a way to quickly get a site off of the ground with as little effort as possible. For many this is the goal, but I wanted to enjoy the experience of building my blog. I wanted to build something from the ground up. Make it my own. For better or for worse, with my terrible frontend skillz that desperately need to be improved while I embrace the Jamstack blogging way.

This is the stack I settled with for this blog in 2025:

• 11ty static site generator and content management.

• Bulma CSS framework because I wanted to try something new.

• Pagefind for serverless client-side search.

• AWS is hosting the static content in S3, which is served by Cloudfront.

• Cloudflare for DNS.

• Github actions workflow for automated smoke test and deployment.

• Bringing it all together with terraform.

Future plans

• Post comments using bluesky
• Tagging for post collections instead of a firehose of thought

At some point I will write a post about the site, and maybe even opensource everything, but this is the first post 🍻.