I rebuilt my blog all by myself
I'm officially a self-built blogger.
Previously, I was using Pika, and I cannot overstate how awesome that product is. I really loved using it, and I found it hard to tear myself away. If you're starting an indie blog/newsletter in 2026, I would really urge you to consider Pika.
Having said that, I am a tinkerer at heart. And, having seen so many wonderful hand-built websites on the indie web, I had to scratch my itch.
What you're now looking at is my brand-new, hand-built blog website.
What I used
The website is built using a static site generator called Eleventy (11ty). It's great, once you get over the learning curve. I love that I can write my blog posts and pages using Markdown or HTML. It's super lightweight, and I'm very happy with it so far.
Continuing the lightweight theme, I used Pico CSS, which provides a very minimal set of components and styles to get you started. I've customised it with a few layout choices of my own. Look at me writing CSS!
This was my first time rolling my own RSS feed (thanks to Brandon Rozek for a great tip on how to get RSS readers to easily discover my feed using a link tag). Everything seems to have worked okay so far!
If you discover any issues or bugs, please do email me.
In the meantime, I'm very excited about the new version of my blog site. Again, huge thanks to the folks over at Pika for supporting me so well — I will miss you!