I recently decided to completely rewrite my website. My old one sat, unchanged, for almost 3 years and I never really put much effort into adding new features to it or updating it with content, despite it being technically possible.
The process just had too much friction and I never felt like had anything big enough to say that it would be worth the effort; I didn't want to have to open a code editor just to write a little Markdown post, and I certainly didn't want to have to start creating pull requests in GitHub to get that content live.
So, I decided to rewrite it all, and look for a way to write and manage this site's content that was more inline with a traditional CMS. It would be nice to be able to access it anywhere, from any device, so I'm not restricted only to places that I happen to have cloned my site's repo to.
I also fancied a rewrite because I wanted to use Remix. I really like Remix. The loaders and actions and nested routing and "use the web" mantra give you so much control with such a great DX, and I found it really clicked for me when building other projects with it.
I only stumbled across Keystatic very recently but it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Following their guide on adding Keystatic to a Remix project, I was very quickly able to get a working "admin panel" with a really nice editor too. Theoretically I can login to this editor from any device, sign in with GitHub, and then publish posts without ever having to use a terminal or open VSCode. Exactly what I want!
I'm hoping this massive reduction in friction will lead to me writing more, because definitely something I want to do more, even if it feels quite ropey at first. And I trust Remix to be powerful enough, too, to let me extend this site with whatever I want in the future. If I suddenly decide I need a place to track books that isn't my Goodreads, for example, it's definitely something I could integrate.
Thanks for reading! 👋