I’ve been wanting to get Turtle Post back up and running for a while now. Originally it was merely a website dedicated to the little library I put in front of my house. But over the years I decided to revamp it as my primary online presence. I like the name, and I feel like I have a lot to add to it.

I could have just revived the static site I made for it originally. But when thinking about what I wanted for it’s future - to be a place where I can share my thoughts and projects - I realized that while it offers the maximum amount of control on a per page basis. The publish and management time/cycle required isn’t tennable in the long term.

After looking around for a while I eventually settled on a markdown based website built using Hugo. This works fairly well with Obsidian as my primary note taking repository and allows for a ton of flexibility in the future. But this also presented an issue.

As soon as I installed Hugo I knew I wanted to make it my own. To write everything from the templates to the css styling. And immediately started work learning the system… And down the rabbithole I went.

I could have simply used a “Good Enough” template. But despite finding several that looked nice. I had an aversion to their complicated setup. And yet here I was reinventing the wheel, steadily learning an entire new api and deeply powerful but complicated templating system. And I was deadlocked and buried under the mountain of work I put forward for myself. I even had a template system I was essentially copying part by part. Learning as I went.

This is a problem and lesson I tend to learn over and over again. I strive for perfection in the things I do. To make my projects worth the time and effort I put into them. But it’s also a trap. I get bogged down, stressed out and end up quitting.

So I’ve decided to just get on with it and use that template I like. I know who I am. I won’t be satisfied with it as it is. But I can afford to upgrade it over time to suit my needs. Learning at a slower pace while still getting active use out of the site. It WILL change, this site WILL evolve over time. It’s as inevitable as me taking on new projects.

But today the website lives. And I was able to make my first post. A cautionary tale on perfection vs