This is nice advice. I ended up with choice paralysis even deciding how to set up and publish blog posts. Static site generators with deployment pipelines? Something more traditional like Wordpress? Other?
It's fun to set up static site generators but I think it's better to pick something you can start writing in immediately instead of spending time thinking about what to use.
If you end up enjoying blogging you can switch to different software later if you like. But don't let that stop you from starting to write now.
This is really great advice and I appreciate it. You're right about having something to start writing in immediately. It's funny getting tied up in the process when I haven't really even discovered if I have much love or knack for writing yet!
All the replies to my comment have been super helpful but the mindset to write immediately is important. I'm grateful for the suggestions and one of the other replies also sound positive for bearblog - it could work out well and I'm going to check it out :-)
If I had discovered bearblog I probably would have never written my current static site generator. Bearblog is exactly what I was looking for because you don’t have to make any choices. Just write!
Just use whatever is easy to get started with for you and go from there. My first version was something like:
#!/bin/sh
for p in *.html; do
cat .head >out/$p
txt2tags $p >>out/$p
cat .footer >>out/$p
done
And that worked for me. It was simple to set up and it allowed me to focus on the writing itself, rather than all the plumbing surrounding it. You can always switch tools later if need be (as I have done).
Sometimes programmers can get all hung up on the tooling: "I want to do X", "Oh, I need to find or write software to do X", spends more time tinkering with or writing software for X instead of doing X.
If your barrier of entry is setting something up, I'd definitely go with wordpress as it makes it quite seamless when writing new posts.
As for me I use 11ty [1] for my blog [2]. I quite like 11ty as I just write markdown files and it gets converted to static content. I'm also testing the grounds on using it for an online magazine, basically want to do some css garden tricks for different types of content. Seems to work quite well for this as I want as little JS being sent as possible.
Gosh this is a horrible spiral I've been going through as well. My personal experience is:
1) WP: You start with promising yourself to never touch any PHP and will still end up in this mess. I always regretted setting up WP few days/weeks after.
2) Gatsby/Next: I'm saying this as one of those frontend hipsters: For a personal blog, just don't. The npm ecosystem imho got so messy that it always added more pain to actually start writing.
3) Hugo: just do it. It's small, fast, nice and once you wrapped your head around their taxonomy and theme model, it's really nice and easy to extend and fun to actually blog.
Either you want to just get it done or you enjoy the process of tinkering on the infrastructure.
If you want it done: pay somebody a small amount to do the things. Sometimes it's even free.
If you like tinkering: pick a static site generator. Whichever one you pick will be wrong, but the process of setting it up and getting the first entries through will be a learning experience. In a bit you will have an opinion on what went well and what didn't, and be able to learn from others.
(I use Pelican with a bunch of plugins and a repeatedly abused CSS file. It's not right for everyone, but I like it.)
I started writing plain .md files in GitHub and published using their default jekyll template for about a couple of years while. In the meantime, I messed around with several static generators before eventually just writing my own. Gives you something to blog about too :)
