For the few of you who’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’ve changed blogging engines several times recently, even more frequently than my usual pace.
The most recent moves happened over just a few weeks. I went from WordPress to Blot to Hugo and back to WordPress. I wrote this about moving away from WordPress only two months ago:
Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can.
It’s no different now. I am less than two days into using WordPress and I’m already frustrated. It’s so damn janky and the editor sucks hard. For example, if I select all the text in a block and cut it, only one character is actually deleted, but the whole block ends up in the clipboard. Similarly, after selecting text, hitting the delete key does nothing. It’s maddening.
What about Hugo, then? Hugo is a great SSG. It’s fast, capable, and mature. It’s also difficult (for me) to tweak. I find its go-based templating format to be unfathomable. Yesterday, I couldn’t figure out how to make “page bundles” with relative image paths work in the RSS feed. It’s death by 1,000 cuts.
In theory, both WordPress and Hugo are the best choices for me, depending on if I’m feeling like using easy or hard mode, respectively. But neither work in the long run. I’ve written all this down so many times, but I never listen.
So, after re-reading Blot is just right, I feel like I was right. I looked at the old blot site and the way it looks appeals to me. It’s simple. It’s calm. I like it. I moved to Hugo because I was in one of my moods where I want to be in total control over everything. With Blot, the biggest thing I lose is that I can’t touch the rendered site. But, I have all of my content locally, so what’s the big deal, really?
I’ll miss built-in comment and analytics, the easy management of images, and the infinite supply of plugins. I won’t miss the janky editor, the heavy rendered pages, or plugins constantly upselling themselves.
Stand by while I re-do everything. Again.