SamRagsdale.com V3

The year is 2023 and I'm launching V3 of SamRagsdale.com. You're currently viewing V3 at minimum.

I created SamRagsdale.com in 2020 to begin the process of documenting my work and externalizing it. The process of packaging a project, its intent and the corresponding learnings would motivate me to finish existing projects and filter those not worth the time. Secondarily, I hoped to improve my writing and timeline estimation through practice.

The goal of the site transitioned over time to be a running index of my ideas and free-time spend.

To some extent the site achieved these goals, but both V1 and V2 required too much overhead to publish, and did not allow me the flexibility to add the fun custom features that pop into my head during hypnagogia pre-bedtime. Often these ideas are terrible, but they're always fun.

SamRagsdale.com V1 was built on Ghost a self-hostable blogging platform. The only criteria I had at the time was self-hostable and markdown posts. I quickly became bothered by the lack of customizability and the monolithic stack which required a $30 / month box on GCP rather than a static hosting solution.

SamRagsdale.com V2 was built on Hugo a markdown based static site generator. While this could be hosted cheaply on any bucket storage service, the customizability was restricting and custom features needed to be added to the generator, creating a strange layer of indirection in my workflow.

The goals for SamRagsdale.com V3 are simple:

• Text forward
• Markdown based posts
• Auto redirect links (see SamRagsdale.com/milk)
• Modern and flexibile static site stack: React, Next, Tailwind, GCP

The aspiration for this site is to remain dead simple from a navigation and content addition perspective, while allowing maximum flexibility to add strange niche features.