About this site
Tuomitie.com has been a long time coming. I've had blog projects for what must be 20 years by now, none of them successful. I started dabbling in WordPress soon after it came out when I was studying, but could never quite put it all together in a way that felt right. After a couple of tries (and several years between them) the system had grown so complex that I wanted to try something simpler. I found Ghost, which sounded hip and cool. It has a self-hosted option, which was a must to me, because, let's face it, I don't want to be paying anyone for the unused resources this thing will just leave sitting on the servers. It also turns out Ghost is heavily geared towards creators serving monetized content to their subscribers, which, again, is something I have zero use for.
The current iteration
In the late 2023 I heard about the Astro framework. It can pre-render static site structures which are blazing fast - an antidote to the bloated web where even the simplest of things want massive JavaScript frameworks to render them. Astro also allows me to write my content in Markdown, which makes perfect sense, but feels very fresh when coming from a background of legacy publishing systems. Because I wanted to also include my photography on the site, I ended up going with an additional CMS to have a better hold over my content. I chose Strapi, which is open-source and self-hostable.