My current project is to slowly remove my need for VPS. Unfortunately, I enjoy hosting my own email server, so I’ll never be able to get rid of them entirely. Nonetheless, I can still try for the rest of my content, starting with my blog.

I started with WordPress as is a very common blogging platform, and there are a lot of tutorials helping with the setup and maintainance. While that was a great start, I was never too happy with the offering. I’m not sure what it was, but despite having some great features, I just wanted something dead simple to do it all for me. Ultimately, I just want to focus on what I’m doing, and not have to worry about the management of the website or theming. While in the past I have played around with other platforms, I found them lacking in features that I wanted, such as image gallery support. Hence, I kept coming back to WordPress, being the best of what I’d found.

At the start of the year, I started to refresh my other sites and I was looking for a static site generator to use. It was mostly because I am lazy and don’t really want to learn HTML/CSS and make a custom page. I decided to try out Hugo as I read that it had org mode support, and being the Emacs lover I am, I found that compelling enough. While I started drafting the sites in org, I found its support to be lacking and changed to the better supported (and simpler) markdown.

While I had considered Hugo, I didn’t feel the motivation at the time to move over to it. What finally spurred the interest was hearing about Ghost, a lighter weight alternative to WordPress. I was interested as it seemed pretty similar to what I was looking for, being a simple, opinionated blogging platform. The problem came in it requiring a database, so still requiring a server. I tried to spin up an instance and found it interesting, but began to wonder about going all the way to static, especially if moving it all to markdown in the backend. Given my past experience with Hugo, I decided to try it instead and if that failed I could always copy the existing markdown pages into Ghost.

Porting the site was fairly easy, just a bit tedious copying the pages and fixing them to be in proper markdown. Looking online I was able to find a gallery addin, which took a bit of tweaking to make work. Finally, I had the whole site moved to Hugo, and hosted on Netlify. Picking a theme is a bit interesting, I need something supporting comments, analytics and that looks half decent for a blog. Its a bit of an interesting problem, and the current one seems to work.

Being able to write in Emacs and manage the blog in git is a joy. Emacs is what I am used to writing in, using it for notes in Uni, and its great to be able to come back to it for other things. Git is also pretty good for management, although it seems a bit redundant for managing a blog, where it is mostly pages being added rather than modified. Still, easier than managing WordPress and its blocks.