I feel like I’ve gone through another set of “try something new other than WordPress but came back to WordPress” yet again.
I discovered Hugo and I use it on my main website, which I call a “digital cafe” over at https://binarydigit.cafe.
https://binarydigit.coffee/hello-again-wordpress/After getting the hang of the static site generator, Hugo, I found an awesome them – Blowfish.page and absolutely love it. I want to still keep the concept of a “digital garden” on that site, so it serves more static informational pages. It’s the place where I want to call “home” and point folks to if they are looking for information about me or my interests. I want to build it up like a wiki and note taking site and keep it fun like all of my sites. I even added webmentions which was a feat on it’s own.
Still Missing Something
After I was done, sitting down and writing up a post seemed a bit of a chore. I had to be on my Mac (since I set git up with my dev tools there), and I have to deliberately create my post, fine a a feature image, resize it or create it etc. I became a bit lazy and then wrote the post “Not a Blogger“. I thought maybe I just didn’t want to blog, but I admitted to opening up a Tumblr account again and having fun with hand curating and blogging short form.
Trying out Other Platforms
I tried self hosting with flat files. I tried Ghost. I tried 11ty. I checked our various commenting systems. Nothing was as satisfying as a CMS with an “easy to type up and add photos admin interface”, that I can do on any computer I have and my phone or tablet. I was missing the ease of having a choice of a million plugins if I needed indie web integrations, ActivityPub, webmentions, and native comments. WordPress has them all, even if a site can be bloated if you aren’t careful.
So here I am, back on a clean install of WordPress, clean install of plugins, only the ones I need. It turns out there are a crap ton of them. But I’m very happy to be back for now. Until I discover the perfect SSG with CMS integration (and even willing to pay for it). Plus I have 2 more years of shared hosting so it’s the perfect time to use it.
Welcome to my personal blog of micro posts, and writing whatever the heck I like, and not using social media for it. My internet home is the cafe and this coffee site is for small sips of content.
You can follow this blog on the fediverse at @binarydigit@binarydigit.coffee ☕Thanks for reading!
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