For whatever reason, I’ve been wanting to try an alternate way of composing this blog. Now, I’m not a frequent blogger, as you can see. I’ve daydreamed of putting more content at this site, but I tend to be slow at getting around to it. I’m not sure if switching to a different platform would make me write more, but there is peace of mind involved.
WordPress is actually pretty nice. It does a lot of things, and is pretty much a content management system (CMS), as opposed to just a blog platform. It’s probably a great choice if you need to throw something up like a personal or professional blog, website for your business, or whatever. Especially if you have something where a bunch of people will be logging in and creating content.
I continue to use it because it makes things like formatting, as well as managing and uploading images easy. That, and it’s easy to throw a new theme on the site. While those are pluses, it also does so much, and requires PHP and MariaDB (MySQL). These are pretty standard if you’re just looking for someplace to host your blog, but for a self-hoster such as myself, simplifying things is attractive.
Static site generators have become popular these days – you compose your content with a text editor using Markdown, and the generator uses a template to generate your site as a bunch of HTML files. Then you just stick them on your server by whatever means, eg rsync. I’ve looked at these, and have been toying with writing my own. My reasoning is that I would have to switch from WordPress, and while a lot of what’s available would probably work great, I might as well take this as an opportunity to give it a try. It might be fun or something.
In reality, this is at the bottom of a list of projects, but I daydream now and then. WordPress is a complex beast, but it’s easy to install and keep going, and that makes a big difference.
Actually, I have been playing with WriteFreely as well, and have set up a secondary blog with it here. It’s a single Go executable, and I wanted to mess with it because you can follow it from the Fediverse. I’m not sure this will completely replace my blogging here, but it’s something I’m trying out.