On Moving to a Better Stack

I have been thinking about moving this weblog onto a subdomain. Something like blog.hystereo, and the front page turned over to a directory of what I am working on, and the photographs perhaps somewhere else again — their own subdomain, or their own subdirectories, I haven’t decided. The trouble is that every version of the plan I find satisfying is a version in which things are further apart than they are now, and I built this place on the principle that everything should be within reach. So I can’t say it’s really a plan...more like an itch I keep describing to myself as an architecture.

I have always kept a blog. It has never occurred to me not to. I grew up with a journal, and pen and paper were never my strength, but a journal I could open in a browser was something I could take apart. That was the point of it. I would rewrite the templates instead of the entries, and change the stylesheet instead of finishing the paragraph, and somewhere in all that avoidance I learned to code. It was never really so much about updating my imaginary readers, but rather an excuse to keep tinkering.

And everything is vibe coded now. As an occasional coder I found it interesting at first — the speed of it, mostly, the way an idea could exist by evening. Then I started seeing it everywhere, and now I can’t stop seeing it. Isn’t it obvious, fellow readers? It’s most obvious in the design. Good programmers, people who can genuinely build, handing the look of the thing over to a model and accepting whatever comes back, and I would not mind that at all if the results were not so uniformly the same. So I’m going to try it properly and honestly: vibe code this entire site from scratch by porting it to Next.js, and find out whether it actually performs better or only feels like it does.

My PHP and SQLite were never good and are now well out of date. PHP 8 is a different animal altogether, and I keep telling myself I have the time to learn it. I have said that for a few years now. It’s easier to say when the alternative is a faster stack that deploys at the click of a button, which is exactly the sort of reasoning I would be suspicious of in anyone else.

We’ll see.