For this site only, for now
For a little background, I haven't had a lot of fun with wordpress for my personal homepage for a while. Its not that wordpress is a bad piece of software, or that the company behind it are bad. Rather, this homepage is my hobby, and maintaining it has started to be a bit of a pain.
Everytime I decide to site down and write I have to update a bunch of plugins, the theme and typicall the wordpress installation itself. Because wordpress is such a powerhouse on the internet it makes sense for the scammers to spend a lot of time finding vunerabilities.
So, reason one for me to switch to a static site, is security and ease. There is no database, active server side code, etc. Just plan HTML, CSS and probably some JS as the site evolves.
I don't like the gutenburg editor
The second, less critical reason for me to start looking to make the switch is that I don't really like the gutenburg editor. I either like WYSIWYG or HTML typically, but I'm learning markdown and for this site I'm writing in ReStructuredText which I'm enjoying.
The advantages of the block editor is evident for anyone that is creating content for a brand or part of a team. Or if you are just managing a large site. The blocks you can develop that you can change once and they will replicate throughout the site, or the way that you can actually see how the post will look on the theme as you develop it is amazing.
However, you have to be logged in to do this, and I'm not always in a place that I can log into a server to just ramble into a blog post. My preferred method of rambling is a text editor.
Then when I get home I have to log on, paste in the ramblings, add a category, tags, etc and finally post it. It may seem odd, but that is too much to the old workflow for when I have time at a computer to hobby and such.
Now, with my static site generator, I can write up a post when I like in any text editor that I may have around, including an email to myself, include the various meta tags at the top and when I do get to a computer save it to the write folder and it will publish next time I type publish in the command line.
Not my first static site generator
This isn't my first time giving a static site generator a try. My first attempt was GetPublii. It seemed great, GUI that would parse markdown, WYSIWYG or a block editor, easy theme development, etc.
However, it is early in their development life and getting responses from the maintainers, and a feature request that was ignored meant that I couldn't go that route.
In fact, at that time I decided to just stick with wordpress for this page and our family archive. I toyed with using the Static Site plugin for wordpress, but found that to be cumbersome for this site, but it is an amazing tool for archive copies of the family archive. If you enjoy the wordpress experience it is a great way to limit your exposure of concern one above.
It's still a Work in Progress
As you can tell there are still a bunch of pages and posts missing from the site, they are coming. I still don't like the theme and I want to work on that too.
I really didn't want to wait any longer to get this online though, so here we are. I the future I will probably talk about why I chose pelican, how I have everything set up, etc.
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