Announcing Goatmire Elixir & NervesConf EU

10-12th of September in Varberg, Sweden.

The conference is an initiative by Underjord that will be executed under a not-for-profit. It is our chance to put on an Elixir event with our own perspective.

Primarily influenced by my experience at GigCity Elixir, the legendary EMPEX and what I've heard of The Big Elixir. The small single-track conferences have history in Elixir but I've not seen one in Europe. Now we are making one.

Open for talk suggestions and happy to talk sponsorship. More details will come as we roll along. Let me know what you think!

And in spite of the conference I still want to mention the shirt store selling official merch from Elixir projects.

We are taking pre-orders for the Elixir shirt. Please get your orders in if you want it. We ship in March. So excited!

Joyful tinkering

Building the Goatmire site was the first time in a while that I built a straight-up website. And in some of the feedback I've gotten it definitely shows. Todo-items for today? Add doctype, add OpenGraph metadata so LinkedIn stops calling the site Ticket Waiting List and using Andrea as the thumbnail.

Figuring out that I could take my SVG logo and then do SVG animation to move the gradient outline light was a ton of frustrating fun. Some people will never notice. But I know. I like it. There is tons more I'd like to do with the site but I also had to ship it eventually. The contents are more important than the sparkles that I'd like to spend all my time on.

Actually building a website is a lot more work than one expects. Lots of details to take care of. I did the yak shave of setting up my own SSG because I don't want the attack surface and maintenance of running a dynamic CMS. Building the SSG using Jason Stieb's post was a  fun and occasionally painful diversion. I am actually curious to tidy it up, rip out my custom event-related stuff and make it a start project for websites. I have more websites to build and I am more productive in HEEx than in Hugo's Go templates and I'd rather minimize my exposure to the JS tooling ecosystem.

I'd love to use a ready-made template for a nice site but finding a combo of a look I want and a tool I can stomach is near-impossible. This is why I'm okay with reinventing a bit of wheel. I don't mind owning the code that generates the site. It guarantees me the flexibility I want.

But if I can break out some of it into libraries or tooling and I can keep some stuff solved after having solved it once. Such as OpenGraph, eventually I'm sure I'll need a blog with RSS feed. That type of stuff. Then at least I'll have something I can keep evolving and using. I keep running into the need to make websites. I still don't have a good answer for user-friendly editing. Git is fine for what I need most of the time but it won't hold for non-technical people needing to edit a site. And that might end up being needed here or there.

There is no business in building and maintaining a static-site generator or CMS unless you make a ton of websites as an agency and that's a business that has terrible margins to begin with. That's why people use WordPress, it already exists and has all the features. Damn the consequences. Though those consequences are also piling up in a weird way right now with the Mullenweg meltdown.

In Elixir I've seen a few SSGs and CMS efforts come and go. I remember being very excited about Still, now archived. Griffin is in Alpha and not sure I had heard of that but seems currently alive. Beacon CMS has gotten way further than I dared hope but I'm not sure they are doing what I'd want in terms of a CMS though the demo video was cool. Mischka CMS is archived and looks put on indefinite hold.

Websites. Super important both in terms of reclaiming power from the social platforms and in terms of being able to get stuff out into the world. They are still incredibly valuable but there is almost no margin in the market. It has been beaten into the ground by low hourly rates and CMS services offerings and as an industry seems to be mostly a meat-grinder for junior web devs. I used to be in it and from a distance it doesn't look like it has changed aside from including more React now. And if you dare look towards e-commerce it is even worse.

Bad business aside I apparently still really enjoy building a website. Let me know if you want me to unpack my ideas for website development more. I do have a chunk of opinions.

You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.