I don’t remember why but a few weeks ago I considered building a new blog platform from the ground up which in hindsight — scratch that, it was always at the forefront of the concept– was a really stupid idea no matter which angle you look at it from. There’s the display portion (i.e. the entire front-end), the back end with data storage abilities, all of the little things we take for granted like comments and meta data and image upload, storage, and display, and then there’s the matter of where to host it. At one point in my life I really enjoyed tackling projects like this, but I somehow feel that Way Back When I didn’t have nearly as many project ideas as I do now.

Trying to prioritize project ideas has always been a problem, but I think it’s becoming more of a problem as I get older. Some of the reasons are obvious, and some, not so much. In the former column, my mind isn’t as malleable as it used to be which means that while I am certainly able to learn new things, it takes longer and more intense study along with a good amount of trial and error. I have always been afraid of this aspect of aging as I have always counted on a love of learning to keep me motivated. The the latter column, I think there’s just too many options on how to approach a task these days that deciding on which option to learn adds a dash of analysis-paralysis to the mix that I really don’t appreciate.

After understanding how dumb of an idea it would be to start a new platform from scratch, I started to stumble across different parts of a larger platform that — theoretically — could play nice together to get me what I wanted. The first was the front-end platform called Astro, which I have written about already and won’t rehash. The second was a plugin for Visual Studio Code — the integrated development environment (IDE) that I use — that will examine your website structure and make space for the creation of Markdown-based posts and media uploads. I thought that this would be wonderful! I naïvely thought that I might be able to deploy an Astro site to my hosting server and use Front Matter to just add files to the site over there and BAM! Instant publishing platform!

The Universe has other ideas because I’ve tried maybe seven different times over the past two days to get something set up and there have been problems every time…all of my own design. I can get everything running in the dev server framework, but Astro has two modes: static files, or server-side rendering. Since static files are faster and are the native output of a compiled Astro project, I opted to stick with that which meant I couldn’t just drop in new posts and be done with it. I need to add the content, recompile, and deploy so I looked at Astro’s roster of deployment help files for various platforms. I tried Github pages but couldn’t get it to work. I tried Vercel, but never got far enough to deploy because I kept mangling the base site on my development machine.

The reasons aren’t “incompetence” or even “laziness” as many internet pundits would like to believe when development goes haywire. For me, it’s my mental state right now. What I do know about this process I learned by reading snippets of “getting started” posts which of course is not the best way to tackle a project, but in order to become fluent enough for this one specific project I would need to read the entire documentation on Astro, and the entire documentation on Front Matter and the entire documentation on Github Pages (with Actions as a sequel) or the entire documentation on Vercel or whatever other platform I’d try to host with. That’s a lot of concentration, and time because meanwhile, nothing about the project is happening so I feel like I’m not progressing and as I know about myself, that’s one sure way to get me to lose interest in a project. Instead, I’m annoyed with how much I have to learn to just get this project started.

This is where I am right now. I have a desire to keep creating stuff, but I’m starting to lose patience with the art of spending time learning how to create stuff, and It’s killin’ me over here. I don’t feel like I have the time, or sometimes even the mental bandwidth, to sit down, relax, and absorb information. I don’t want to assume a grave stance by saying “my time is short” but it’s certainly not getting any longer. The worst part about it is not that it’s happening as I get older, though, it’s acknowledging that it’s happening and that I’m going to have to start learning how to let go of projects and ideas I never got around to tackling.