If one is looking for a simple/personal blog and wants to write in plain-text Markdown, one should consider Jekyll on GitHub Pages[1]. The beauty is that one does not need to worry about setting up Jekyll on the local machine. Just write and push to Github. If one wants to skip that, just go to GitHub and write there; a version of VSCode is built in there.
This also allows one to carry (take out) their content anywhere on any platform that supports plain text (MarkDown). Browsers can also just render plain-text as it, so if you just drag-drop them on a server, it should render as your website.
I have a pretty large personal site[2], and I hate Jekyll because it takes too long to compile locally, but I’m on it because I don’t let it interfere with my writing.
As for a WordPress replacement/alternative, it is going to be pretty hard to find something as prolific and click-clacky easy as WordPress to start off. It has like two decades of the mother of all kitchen sink built-in for anyone to jump in and rummage something out it.
Update/Edit: Github Pages has also become rock solid stable too. No downtime in the past 3+ years.
Its solid advice if that is your problem and if you are migrating from a standard wordpress. I ran into another problem - I wanted a static site[0].
I tried some of the static hosting engines, including Jekyll, but they always seemed to want to force my site into a blog format. Yeah with some work they could partially be twisted into what I wanted, but only partially.
Do you know of a static website builder that builds websites, and not blogs?
[0]: The difference to me is that my content should never have a date associated with it, and the landing page should be a landing page, not a list of recent pages.
Yes, yes, I was there Gandalf. I was there 3,000 years ago. I tried Publii during its early release or beta (I think it was popular on HN). Unfortunately, I felt that it encapsulated too much for me and my site just died -- similar issues with waiting for my tea to boil while Jekyll compiles a simple style change.
I wanted to update my thoughts on Publii. I downloaded it again yesterday and I think I'm going to use this for some of my other websites. This is looking much better and pretty interesting now than I saw it a while back. They even have a good revenue model working for them; I saw the marketplace.
A blog without integrated commenting is not a proper blog, IMHO. And sure, you can add 3rd party commenting to a static page, but from what I've seen none of them are as good (or as free).
1. Move all of your images and static assets (zip, downloads, pdfs, videos) that are not part of WordPress textual content to something like S3+Cloudfront. Maintain that as in a sub-domain `https://static.brajeshwar.com/` Now, start using it in your writing as `<img src=“https://static.brajeshwar.com/2024/beautiful-picture.webp”>`. This makes it easy and allows you to switch WordPress hosting providers in minutes if not seconds. In my case, around late 2000s and early 2010s, I keep getting warned by Media Temple (mt) of the bandwidth and so Amazon’s S3 came to the rescue.† WordPress plugins are a galore that does the re-direct. That solved multiple problems - not tied down to a particular hosting provider, a CDN that is simple and cheap. Thus, moving out of WordPress with the text that contains those links will continue to just work.
2. Once you move to Static HTMLs, in my case, I felt that it makes more sense to just have them together in one folder — `brajeshwar.com` with everything in it — all the files. I also tend to ask the question and try answering, “Can I move out easily?” That has let me to not use images and other non-essential contents as much as I can avoid. An article/post should continue to work and be meaningful even if the images fails.
† My website was kinda of a deal back then. Now, CloudFlare claims that my website does about 4-5GB a month in bandwidth. This is after I have deleted many, delegated most downloads to Github, and to S3+ CloudFront sub-domains such as `cdn.oinam.com` and `archives.oinam.com`. During the days when (mt) complains is when it hits like 50GB a month on downloads, etc.
In all of this, these days, I pay single digit dollar every month to maintain my entire personal website and the remnants of its past. I don’t want the links from Adobe, Google, Wikipedia, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. to end up in a 404.
If you don't mind paying a few bucks a month, you can give my service [1] a try. I actually designed it with that specific use-case in mind. Handling images is the biggest PITA for static-site generators.
There are other image CDNs (Cloudinary, Imagekit, Imgix) but they have been designed for developers and are prohibitively expensive beyond their free-tier.
I've done this sometimes with hosting images and other large files on a combination of Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, and Zenodo. Flickr costs money, but it feels like it's worth it given I'm using Netlify and all the others for free.
I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.
> I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.
This is one reason why I started asking, “Is this image really needed for this article.” As for the thumbnail generation, I used to have a few Photoshop actions that I just click and be done with.
Now, I just manually optimize the few images I uses in such a way that it is somewhere in the middle -- CSS can still shrink it as a thumbnail but the original isn't that too large either. Something like that.
If you still maintain that a popular website to worry about images that much, I would try out CloudFlare image service.
Static sites are ~impossible to hack, whereas a WordPress site needs to be kept constantly up to date or else. And as we've learned recently, you're only one Matt tantrum away from having the flow of security updates interrupted.
You could use another host because GitHub if you'd like, but GitHub Pages is unambiguously better than WordPress unless you actually need a CMS.
This also allows one to carry (take out) their content anywhere on any platform that supports plain text (MarkDown). Browsers can also just render plain-text as it, so if you just drag-drop them on a server, it should render as your website.
I have a pretty large personal site[2], and I hate Jekyll because it takes too long to compile locally, but I’m on it because I don’t let it interfere with my writing.
As for a WordPress replacement/alternative, it is going to be pretty hard to find something as prolific and click-clacky easy as WordPress to start off. It has like two decades of the mother of all kitchen sink built-in for anyone to jump in and rummage something out it.
Update/Edit: Github Pages has also become rock solid stable too. No downtime in the past 3+ years.
1. https://pages.github.com
2. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/