Wordpress is a glorious conglomeration of PHP which works very well, PHP which works poorly and PHP which doesn’t work at all. The former is generally written by the Wordpress developers, the next by me, and the latter by me after around 11pm.
This website existed for a while on wordpress.com. It was the natural choice: everyone uses wordpress to manage blogs, and this is little more than a blog. On the other hand, writing in a web browser is irritating (writing is what text editors are for) and does one really need the whole wordpress architecture to serve a lot of static pages and images? Wordpress.com won’t even let you install plugins on the free tier, so it’s not like I was doing anything with all that dynamic ability anyhow.
Enter gitlab pages and Hugo. Gitlab, not Github, simply because all my repositories are already there (back in the day gitlab offered unlimited private repositories, which was very attractive). Hugo because 1. it’s shockingly fast and 2. it’s written in Go, and I know nothing about Go; how better to find out? Update: we are now on github pages. Serving is slightly faster; Github Actions I actually know (unlike gitlab), and the hugo action is written in typescript, so it doesn’t need to pull a docker container, which speeds up deploys.
Thus, this site is now written very largely in markdown, in Emacs or
Vim as the fancy takes me, pushed to a git repository, and appears
magically here online. And it now uses no cookies, no bloat, and no
server-side code at all. Which might encourage me actually to write
for it, since writing is as easy as running hugo new post/date-title.md, opening said file in an editor, committing and
pushing.