Wait!.?.. What?!!? No CMS?
You may notice that this site is powered by Publii rather than Drupal or Wordpress or something even more esoteric (like Pimcore or Elg). One of the things I wanted to avoid with this blog is cost of ownership - in both funds and time. It's not a trivial expense to run a web server. Even using an AWS t2.micro instance adds up over time. But then there's the effort of monitoring it, maintaining the database, performance tuning, and all the other tasks necessary to keep a site running and secure. It's not fun unless there's a reason for it. Sure, I could use shared hosting but I haven't had a lot of good experiences going down that route. It's easier to just run a static website for something like this.
Now, hand coding web pages is just as horrible from a time sink perspective so I was pretty happy when I stumbled across Publii. It behaves kinda like Wordpress but it dumps the pages into an S3 bucket that can then be displayed as a website. Pretty slick. From a pure blogging perspective it's not a lot different than using a blogging CMS like Wordpress. It's also cheaper 'cause S3 is stupid cheap and Publii is free.
Let's break down the full list of pros and cons
Pros
- Inexpensive.
- Easy to use
- Low maintenance
- Handles page formatting for me
- Secure
- Minimal options results in minimal distractions
- It just works
- I get to dive into how to implement a static website
Cons
- The solution isn't terribly portable
- Lack of formating choices
- No super cool features to play with
- Requires a recompile with every new post or change
- The available themes aren't to my taste.
- I'd have to dive into Handlebars in order to address the above
Over all I'm satisfied with this approach for the blog. Of course, I reserve the right to revisit this approach going forward.
Rob
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