Moments of Joy: Technical Solutions

I have a static website. This means that whenever I make a change to the site I need to "rebuild" each page. This involves taking the content of the page -- for example, a blog post -- and turning it into a full page, ready to be served to a reader. I built a custom tool to generate my site as an engineering challenge. I had -- and have -- a lot of fun tinkering with my site, even though the underlying source code is not as elegant as it could be.

When I generated my site this morning, 2,477 pages were made. The majority of these are posts (which comprise ~700 of the pages) and the archive pages that correspond to each post. I create a page for each day and month on which I have published a post.

Herein lies a problem: Every time I make a change, I had to rebuild those pages. It took around a minute to see any change to my site. This made changing details like the design of a page frustrating. My posts would generate first, then every other page (and I usually only need to edit every page that isn't a post).

To help reduce the time it takes to see changes when I am developing my site, I was thinking about adding dependency graphs and implementing incremental regeneration, or potentially moving to a tool like 11ty.

Then...

I was on a call with a friend yesterday who helped me find a delightfully elegant solution to my problem. Rather than rebuild every page, I could build every page other than my posts. This cuts down the time to see a change on my site from one minute to ~6 seconds [^1].

Now, I can stick with a tool that (mostly!) works, and that implements a lot of custom features, without adding unnecessary complexity. I'm delighted.

[^1]: Six seconds might seem like a long time, but little idiosyncrasies like this are fine with me for this site. Like me, this site isn't perfect. This site is delightfully quirky to its bones.