I do love a fresh start. Setting up a site structure, imagining what you might post now that you have the freedom of a blank slate, playing around with the design (still have some tweaking to do on that score).
My problem is I've had far too many of them, but hopefully this will be my last for a while.
I've been using Eleventy for a while (and previous to that Hugo), but honestly it's become a bit of a burden. While I love tinkering with it, the time I have available for that is limited. And it's particularly frustrating when you just want to post something but you have things to fix before you can do that.
In the last few days I set up a blog for my photography on Pagecord, and that reminded me how nice it is to just open a screen, throw whatever you want into an editor and post. No having to check the frontmatter and then doing a git push. No having to worry about if the update you just did broke things on the site. Just write and publish.
While I do really appreciate having total and complete ownership over my own site, the older I get the more I also very much appreciate simplicity. Plus my brain is incredibly easily distracted, so the less friction there is in the writing to publishing pipeline the better.
I like it here on Pagecord. It's simple in the best way - calming and distraction free. You can tinker a little with the looks via custom css, but otherwise it takes away all the distractions and allows you to just write.
So here I am. Hopefully for quite some time to come!