Nice post. Thanks for sharing! I've always been fond of independent websites like this. My own website began in a similar fashion about 25 years ago - minimal, straightforward, and entirely built with ASP (now known as Classic ASP), simply because that was the only suitable technology I knew at the time. Of course, that's not the case anymore. These days, it runs as a statically generated site using Common Lisp [1], and I expect this to be my long-term setup.

Starting with a simple collection of pages was a great way to get started and set up a minimum viable website. But as time passed, I found myself needing a few more features. In order of priority, these included:

1. RSS feeds.

2. A blog listing page with posts ordered by date.

3. The ability to tag posts by topic and generate tag-based index pages.

4. Support for non-blog content, like tools, games, demos, etc. that can also be tagged and included in the RSS feed.

5. Support for comments without relying on third-party services.

With each new requirement, the source code gradually grew. What started as a few hundred lines has now expanded to around 1300 lines of Common Lisp. Not too big in the grand scheme of things but not exactly tiny either. Still, I try to resist the temptation to keep adding every shiny new idea that comes to mind. This remains a solo passion project. I want the entire source code to be something I can hold in my head at once. If I encounter a bug, I want it to be something I can reason about and fix in under 10 minutes, and so far, fortunately, that has been the case.

That said, new ideas are always tempting. Lately, I've been enticed by the idea of adding a blogroll that provides a list of posts from my favourite bloggers. This could replace my usual feed reader. I haven't had the time to implement it yet, but if a quiet weekend comes along, that might just be the next feature I work on. Of course, I remind myself not to let this project spiral out of control. I certainly don't want this to grow into something that can read my email.

[1] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/site.lisp