First and foremost, I want to make clear that there is nothing wrong with Publii! It’s a great open source tool that allowed me to start my Ranobe/Light Novel blog easily when I didn’t have any technical experience (I still don’t tbh).

Ever since I created my blog and medialog on Astro using the Fuwari template, I’ve been contemplating whether I should move to some other solution. The main issue for me is that Publii is a desktop application, and can only be installed on one computer. I’ve setup workarounds like writing my drafts in Jotty (which I self-host) on my laptop and then transferring that content into Publii on my main computer, but there just seemed to be a lot of friction between drafting a post and actually publishing it. If I ever went away on a trip and I only had my laptop on me, I would have to wait until I got home to update and that seriously bothered me.

Using an astro template for my other blogs had me a little more confident in coming up with something as I understood generally what the files did, and the customizations I created using Gemini (such as mastodon comments, updating the table ui, tags ui, adding a guest comments form, netlify serverless functions) made me realize that the next step would be starting from the baseline and creating something new.

This time, I didn’t want to just re-use the fuwari template, and wanted something that would really suit the content I would be writing about. I added in whatever features I could think of, and it was surprisingly simple to implement.

Key points include being able to filter by origin country, author, and month/year, and also sort by title, or date on the front page. I also added a field specifically for the native titles, so they would be displayed alongside the English titles.

I also wanted to add a dedicated spot for all the author, illustrator, editors, and publisher information. It felt important to me to call out the people who worked on the books I love (however it can’t be a replacement for the actual copyright and credits pages, since all that info takes up so much space otherwise haha).

Although this blog’s design didn’t change that much in the migration from Publii to Astro, the fact that I was able to do this at all with some research and AI assistance really means a lot to me. I don’t feel as tied down to one specific ecosystem or limited by what the Publii developers implement (though their tool is still super awesome).

The confidence that I’ll be able to implement whatever ideas I have for this blog (or any other projects) is what’s important to me. The freedom to customize it exactly as I want it is great! I know some people achieve that through handcoded html, css, and javascript, but it’s nice that there are intermediary tools like static site generators that automate many of the harder tasks.

I don’t feel as intimidated when I see github repos for projects, I know I can learn one step at a time.