This is my entry on the topic “Importance of Friction” for January’s IndieWeb Carnival hosted by V.H. Belvadi . If you have written something similar for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, please send it to me as well.

Before I moved to a Hugo blog, I had a WordPress blog. To be honest, it was super easy to use. I could log in, type, edit directly within the browser on any device, and publish with just a few clicks. At the same time, it was quite boring. While the job of writing and publishing was easier, it felt repetitive with not much joy. Even if I wanted to build something cool on my blog, I was confined to the limits of what a WordPress blog could do easily.

Last year, when I decided to move to a blog powered by Hugo, everything changed. It wasn’t the familiar login-edit-publish workflow anymore. It wasn’t as simple as logging in, editing in a rich text browser, and clicking publish, but that was the beauty of it. The challenges, the constraints, and yes, the friction, became part of the joy. I started with a theme and had to tweak it to make the blog like how I wanted. I tweaked a lot. I spent almost half a year tweaking unnecessarily, caught in the endless loop of tweaking. I was slowly embracing the new friction while loving the endless possibilities ahead.

Ever since, I’ve enjoyed and loved the process of shaping this blog into something that is uniquely mine. While I used probably the most popular Hugo theme of all time, it still felt different. Through minor tweaks here and there, most of them that would never be discovered by anyone, the blog was slowly becoming a living, nicheless art piece—and probably the greatest art I will ever produce .

Take my over-engineered blog versioning system , for example. It tracks every change I’ve ever made to the blog, from design tweaks to content updates. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. When I was fed up with the Disqus comment system, I decided to build my own static HTML comments. The friction has cultivated creativity in ways I never expected. Working within constraints of a static blog (and the free tier of Cloudflare!) has pushed me to experiment and innovate. Fun projects like my “ useless button ” or “ the pixel mosaic ” wouldn’t have existed if I had been still blogging on WordPress. The act of writing shortcodes, solving problems, and overcoming technical hurdles isn’t just fulfilling—it’s fun.

Before, uploading images to a post was so easy. I used plugins that would compress and convert images into WebP, a better format for the web (correct me if I’m wrong, especially for a11y). Now it’s different, but this friction made me write and publish a Python package that converts all images in my blog directory to optimized WebP format with just one command. It was a small project, but a lot of new learnings and definitely a new sense of accomplishment to have your own Python package on PyPI !

Blogging with friction has transformed my experience of writing, coding, and publishing. It’s no longer about chasing algorithms or optimizing for convenience. Instead, it’s about crafting something that’s truly mine, something that reflects who I am and what I care about. This blog is now my home on the web—a place where I gather and share my ideas and document my life.

Yes, it’s harder. Yes, it takes more time. But that’s exactly what makes it worthwhile. In a web increasingly focused on making everything instant and effortless, sometimes the best experiences come from embracing the friction. Friction isn’t a barrier; it’s a catalyst. And for me, it’s made all the difference, at least in blogging.

These days, I spend much of my time experimenting with tweaks on my blog and discovering unique personal sites across the IndieWeb and webrings . If you don’t have a blog yet, I strongly encourage you to start one. Build it from the ground up, embrace the challenges, and craft something that’s truly your own!

Let me know if you’re doing it—I’d love to hear about your experience!
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