From R to Go!

Why?

I know, I know, if it works, why change it? Well, it's getting... ugly. It feels outdated and bland. It's also been almost a year since I last wrote anything for it. I have since ventured into game, web, software and embedded programming and I still don't know which I enjoy more. I'm starting to think I simply enjoy programming. Maybe it's the challenge of solving different problems in different ways.

For clarity, the above last line can be read as "... solving a variety of problems with whatever language sounds like fun to write it in."

But... why?

Didn't answer the question the first time, huh? Well, R is great when doing Data Analysis, but what happens when you start venturing into other programming paths that tickle your fancy?

Using Hugo and Blogdown works really well if you're going to be showing charts (images in general, really) as you can set their dimensions within the code blocks.

{out.width=<width> out.height=<height>}

I don't recall vanilla markdown supporting that.

So, for the sake of compatibility and future proofing (for a while anyway), I'm re-writing it using Go/HTMX/Templ for the front and back ends. I haven't decided on a database, yet, or paying for hosting versus rolling my own (which also sounds like a fun project) so my stack isn't complete.

So, why again?

I find using markdown as the main file type to be a hassle. Especially when you're using Rmd for notes and it has to be converted to md before being converted to html to be served. I don't need that many layers.

Not having that many conversions also means that I save on storage space. Being able to divide the site more easily is what I'm really after. I don't want to have to keep track of _index.md versus index.md depending on where in the program structure I am (another future project idea).

Oh, well when you put it that way...

Yeah, it's going to be a long journey. Yeah, it's going to be painful sometimes, but I think it'll be fun... for now.

Well, that's part 1/∞, time to get the show on the road.