Outdated hobbies
PHP and WordPress will survive the apocalypse. The roaches will be blogging extensively. As an elder IT person, the letter came in the mail saying it was my turn to rebuild my blogging setup, like so many people before me.
Background
In the late 00s, a few years into the existence of Twitter, people were building their own blog engines. It was the biggest pastime going, it seemed like. Meanwhile I started this blog in Wordpress and thought, you know - it is fine for both my monthly readers, despite all the PHP. After a while I moved off wordpress.com onto self hosted stuff. More PHP, cheaper domain. Same spam.
Initial state
I found a German hosting firm that would allow me to get a few free domains and a ludicrous amount of websites for two years for a modest sum.
The blog therefore lived there, and all I did was post maybe once per month and delete spam comments every other day.
I could look for new templates, I could buy plugins, I could even write intricate customisations for it, but the problem was -- my needs were quite limited.
Wish list
I wanted a simple editor. I mean I don't mind what we used to call WYSIWYG back in my day, but I didn't really need it. I'm not making anything beautiful. Whatever I produce will look like it was made by a colour-blind old man with astigmatism. I needed to be able to dabble with image generation. I wanted illustrations, and I did not need them to be good, just meh, so image generation is good enough for me and both my readers (I hope).
Formatting? A couple of levels of heading, a link thing, and a box for code samples.
Proposal
Content is Markdown in a Git repo.
Everything else is replaceable. One folder per post holding a Markdown file with frontmatter and the post's own images. Frontmatter carries title, date, lead paragraph, featured image, tags and status. Layouts, CSS, and components live in a separate folder. A redesign touches only that folder. Swapping hosting, editor, or analytics later touches nothing in the content folder.
Static site generator: Astro.
It has typed content collections that validate my frontmatter, image optimisation at build time, and it emits plain HTML with zero JavaScript unless I add some - which I have no interest in.
Hosting: Cloudflare Workers.
Free for this traffic, global CDN, builds on push.
AI image generation
Cloudflare has a free image generation model (or the volume I write)
Editor
Hand-cranked poor-man's UI that reads and writes markdown to Github, offers a markdown editor and preview, plus a button to actuate the image generation.
Outcome
Is it nice? No. It looks like a developer created the UI. It also looks like a developer designed the theme of the site. On the other hand, it is cheaper- and I think it is more honest.
I know today, everybody is an influencer, and I guess I would have been better off creating a youtube channel, but for those of us with a face for radio that still want to document our thoughts somehow - as an aide memoire if nothing else - you can get a static site generator up and running today with criminally little specific knowledge of the ecosystem.