Back to blogging
Technology changes to make blogging fun again
As you can see from the recent inactivity on my blog, I have had a hard time publishing content recently. It has not been for a lack blog worthy content, but how amazingly not fun blogging was on my old platform. I spent a lot of time on my old website, making the theme perfect, adding all the features I thought I needed, etc… I used it quite a bit for a while, but the writing experience always felt strained. It turns out that I hate WYSIWYG editors and would much prefer to just write my content in markdown files. This led me the awesome Hugo software which I am using now. For more info on my current setup, check my Hugo on gh-pages post.
As a developer there are a few places where I feel completely comfortable; a text editor (Sublime Text in this case), the command line, and working with Git repositories. It makes so much more sense to me to use tools I love for managing my content rather than some web UI which just does not feel right.
Here are some of the benefits of a statically generated website:
- Better security. Publishing only HTML, CSS and JS reduces the attack surface of your website giving you better security.
- Better performance. Serving only static files reduces server load and increases performance. Slow queries be gone.
- Host your website anywhere. I am currently hosting my website for free on gh-pages.
- History of changes. By tracking everything in Git repositories you have a history of all your changes.
- Never worry about backups. With everything in Git you never have to worry about backups again, its baked in.
- Write in your favorite editor. Every developer has their favorite tools. There is no place like
127.0.0.1. - Write content offline. All the source markdown files are local, so you can work offline easily.
- Review before publishing. Use Hugo’s built in server to review your content locally before publishing.
- No WYSIWYG editor. This is such a quality of life improvement. I love working in markdown in comparison.
- No security updates. I hated logging into Drupal or Wordpress and seeing a ‘security updates available’ message.
So far this has been an enjoyable change and I am looking forward to discovering more benefits as I get deeper.
