In the past year, I have walked past two cars in a constant state of repair. Their respective owners have spent months tinkering with them, leaving them bare and raw; parts on show, never quite finished. After walking past one of them today (it has a cover over it but I could see that the front part was partially exposed), it made me realise that some of the things we own and love may never be perfect or complete. Some of us may strive for perfection and never reach it. Others might want to progressively enhance what we have or not know what perfection or even “enough” looks like but we’re excited by the journey towards it.
And then I applied those ideas towards websites. There are people I look up to in this space that are constantly tinkering with their websites. I’m one of them although I’ve restricted my changes of late—nothing too hasty or major.
My concerns lie with that constant state of repair. What if you end up with a perpetual Ship of Theseus and remain unhappy with each change? When will you stop to realise this? Will you stop to realise this at all? I’ve never been the kind of person to always look at things as stepping stones towards better. Any site changes I make are either on a whim or because I’m not happy with a particular thing: I moved off WordPress because it was restricted to an ecosystem that I didn’t have full control over and it started to feel like too much. I was also curious about static site generators. I moved to Grav but then moved to Astro because it allowed me to use HTML, CSS, and JS as much or as little as I wanted and with/without components. I’ve tinkered a lot in the last 5 years but a lot of the internals have remained untouched besides housekeeping and optimising the code.
My site isn’t the polar opposite of those cars that I’ve passed by but they aren’t the same either. You don’t really see under the hood too much. I’d rather not leave too much exposed and in progress in a way that’s messy. That’s just me. I’m generally happy with how it looks whether it’s “optimal” or not. Nothing is broken. It could just be better or not and it’s up to me whether I make them better or not. If I want to.
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